The best poets tend to trouble conventions, including those they find necessary.
Poetry
Editors: Eleanor Johnson & Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Past Editors: Christopher Nealon, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, & Yanyi
“I Speak Only for Myself”: Anahid Nersessian on Keats, Feminism, and Poetry
"One of the things that is interesting about Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne is that you can't infer a damn thing that’s happened between them."
Invitations to the Voyage
Three new poetry collections depart on a cosmic journey to reckon with ecology and our relations to a suffering earth.
“Beowulf”: A Horror Show
Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of “Beowulf” forces us to think about what we need to be true about the past, and our access to it.
Beholding Black Life: A Conversation with Ross Gay, Frank Guridy, & Deborah Paredez
“We have to witness everything… You don't do it by yourself. That mode of looking is not like any individual feat; it is a feat of joining.”
Poetry for the Deluge
Amid this turbulent present, can poetry call attention to creative forms of survival and persistence, human and nonhuman?
Seek, Memory …
If memory is an unreliable narrator, how can it be the medium through which we arrive at the truth about ourselves?
Nikki Giovanni on Rest, Love, and Care
“There is nothing supreme about being white.”
Lyn Hejinian’s “Allegorical Activism”
The revelrous, rebellious writing of Hejinian—arguably our foremost poet-critic—works against our sense of psychological and political isolation.
When Poetry Summons the Dead
The dead, the disappeared, and the forgotten—these Iberian poems make clear—can never be safely put away.
The Direction of Beginning
These poems undo the cultural invisibility of America’s Native Nations. They also, with unique abundance, secure the value of poetry itself.
Four Ways to Ruin Dante—and One to Save Him
Why would Dante need help? Because if the poet’s only readers are Dante scholars, then we’ll all lose out. Dante deserves better, and so do we.
The Poetics of Abolition
For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
Re-Word the World: On “Sonnet’s Shakespeare”
What happens when we dismantle the monumental status of a figure like Shakespeare in the canon? What other voices rise to describe the world?
Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
A recent flourishing of Palestinian literature reckons with complications in historical memory caused by settler colonialism.
This Is Not an Essay on Poetry of the Past 20 Years
I am tired of catalogues and catalogue poems, and of surveys and surveillance—though I appreciate a bird’s-eye view of the terrain as well as anyone.
The Metalyrical Moment
Three recent poetry collections have cemented the rise of what we might call the “metalyrical”: poetry that interrogates the conditions of its own expression.
Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
Black Poetry after Beyoncé
How do black feminist artists negotiate their own work in the wake of commercial success beyond contemporary poetry’s wildest dreams?
“I Can’t Make You See What I See”: Talking with Cyree Jarelle Johnson and Jesse Rice-Evans
"Writing about lupus is like writing about ghosts. What do you say about something featureless?"