How to describe the almost-madness of loss? Macdonald uses hawk-taming, Smith "ordinary" poetry about death, and Chapman "Christian love of existence."
He flies only to scurry along another / reach of surf where he / pricks the cold for / prey smaller / than grains of prose. The freedom / to guess right is his...
Mighty planet Earth / orbits to order, its greenest blues / attractive, to make our / life-giving aerial envelope / lawful, obedient, singing. / It turns...
There’s only song / because there are mountains, / because mountains distort / what we say, / and that’s / how song takes shape— / with words twisted / by hills...
In a small way, the foreign residents / Are rounded up—the Spartans sit and comb / Their hair, watched by the Persians from their tents— / Rationing starts...
“the quality of mercy” / is a fierce and terrible beauty.../ it hungers in its waiting / then consumes our darkest brokenness / even as it invites us to its table...
I will wear sweatshirts with bright appliqués / Of owls, and work for Head Start. Saturdays //
Will be the food bank; Sundays, church at ten. / Evenings I'll...
Arch after arch set in the brick, / Rosettes along them, pebble-thick; // Draped, helmed, armed figures, scribes with scrolls, / And eagles in their leafy holes:...
Paint. Paint the soft lines / of damp cheeks across a canvas. / Paint the deep eyes, the little / hand and the orb. / Splash some color along the curve / of her...
You don’t need to be a thespian to appreciate James Shapiro's "Year of Lear"—a brilliant, meticulously researched history of social tensions that inspired the play.
As I said, I’m a lawyer. Technically speaking, / is a head blown to pieces by a smart bomb a beheading? // Infinitely compressible, yet expandable time...
Spanning almost James Agee's entire lifetime, these letters between author and his priest cover alcohol, God, poetry, childhood, and a “mouthful of sweet potato.”
At the Fifth Station of the Cross / I am asked to “accept in particular / the death that is destined for me” / Which I must keep myself from guessing...
Asleep, she has no idea she is old. // She’s running uphill, no lightfoot, but quite fast /
past the houses and driveways of family friends / toward the higher...
Anne Enright's new novel suggests something simple—family, for good or ill, keeps forming us even when we try to escape it—but her prose constantly surprises.
Langdon Hammer's biography of poet and writer James Merrill is "wholly definitive" in scope, and threaded throughout with Merrill’s brilliant, always enlivening wit.
Many modern American thinkers have asked, often and with anxiety, "What is man?" In his latest book, Mark Greif thinks we've outgrown this—and it's a good thing.
Mailer, Trilling, Macdonald, Kazin, Maxwell, Bellow, Auden, O'Hara—men with public moral concerns, who seized power to shape American literature. But who were they?
Baxter reads fiction to “see bad stuff happening.” He writes characters who get into serious trouble, and face their own "human wreckage" at someone else's request.
...in the name of the washed-up, / the lapsed and forgotten, / remnants joined to give loss, // no matter how touch / or random, another shot / at consequence...
"...the part already passed, the part / around the corner, the part that / wrenched the mind from its spiny cave, / the part that sheltered in the flesh..."
