poetry 60

We soaked in the morning and our coffee, aware that we were technically trespassing. But, at the moment, we felt the weight of heritage, a complicated term that outmatched the…

Out on the wrinkled sea, the high notes come shimmering over the cold waves, and 72-year-old Dana Gioia says, “Meet me at the Lighthouse.”

Nature is never pure in these poems; it is always responding to human care or lack-of-care, commodified, and, indeed, turned into a symbol by the poet herself. Emerson doesn't hide…

Creative fidelity is attuned to, and draws out, the richness in people and things. It calls for awareness and attentive seeing. In the end, Paterson is a film about such…

Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our…

Poetry is the creative ordering of words to bring forth the fruits of the human heart and intellect. The poet is called to lose himself, so to speak, in listening…

We have lost something of great value in forgetting the work of John Dos Passos. He was a man who knew who deserved his sympathy, and his work followed his…

This is poetry that focuses its readers on the true, good, and beautiful. Here, we are reminded that Christ took on flesh like ours, that he was born as we…

Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech…

Catullus is not a saint. He is not a moral poet. But his crudity and madness still dance with the shadows of truth and echo with the cry of the…

Benjamin Myers reviews Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. Stacey explores the changing and contested myth of the midwestern…

Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense…

Rural Rebellion by Ross Benes, examines the changing politics of rural Nebraska from the perspective of a native son living in Brooklyn. Nebraska is a cycle of poems by Kwame…

Enjoying the Bible is a book about beholding the deep riches of beauty in Scripture and allowing its literary elements to shape our humanity. A literary approach to Scripture teaches…

In “American Divine,” it would seem that the pursuit is not so much a pursuit of divinity but rather the experience of it—the awe, which in this instance is private…

I’m not canceling Whitman. But my own enthusiasm for his poetry is waning. The poet whose daring versification and daring lifestyle were once seen as the epitome of counter-culture has…

Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing.

With California burning, Antarctica melting, and a death-toll spiraling, we’re left with a looming question: Can a people walking in darkness yet be made to see?

What strikes me overall about The Slumbering Host is the open-heartedness, hopefulness, and steadfastness of the editors’ approach and selection. This is a collection that is true to itself and…

Jane Kenyon was foremost a poet of place. Not of the State of New Hampshire, though she was its Poet Laureate, but of the much smaller and less abstract corner…

The poetry in this book captures some of those everyday moments and holds them up in a light that makes possible another kind of clarity, not that of simply worded…

It is a hybrid, sacramental understanding of the earth and matter and of being in the world. She seems to say that even if the earth of Chilhowee is dry…

As the fall semester looms, the minutia of meetings and syllabi revisions threatens to drain the excitement from my impending return to the classroom. As a way of warding off…

In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who don’t use “velleity” every day, the…