In Sarah Mangold’s bold fourth collection, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, the definition of “woman’s work” changes. Highlighting the contributions of both taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell and Delia Akeley, the wife of “the father of modern taxidermy,” Mangold examines the perception of women who existed in and made significant advances in a male-dominated […]

Kasey Jueds’s second collection, The Thicket, has intersecting emotional and imagistic arcs that reward the careful reader with complex realizations that refuse closure. Two questions are skeleton keys that allow the speaker—and the reader—to unlock metaphorical gates of self-awareness: “where am I?” and “where does one thing become another?” Jueds said these questions are the […]

Throughout his second poetry collection, Christopher Kempf reckons with the schisms at the root of American identity and history, from the Civil War to modern-day mundanities like a “BEACH PARTY STEAK FRY”—as one poem is titled—and a high school homecoming game. In “Homecoming,” Kempf observes the quotidian accumulate to something ultimately as significant national identity: […]

Of the major Australian poets writing in the final decades of the twentieth century, Martin Johnston (1947-1990) bequeathed readers the slimmest oeuvre. Johnston’s reputation rests on his latter two collections and sixteen late lyrics, almost all of which are preserved in Beautiful Objects, a new selection of Johnston’s poetry. Johnston’s work is characterized by erudition […]

Rodney Gómez’s Arsenal With Praise Song offers a world of bones and horns, of rivers and deserts, of lungs, chests, hands: Gómez’s arsenal is elemental. The collection mines histories and performances of violence, with sources as varied as news stories, films, photographs, and Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas of crime scenes. The opening poem, “Warbler,” moves […]

In his notes to the book-length poem Sift, Christian Hawkey observes how the project developed from a prompt: to sustain poetic engagement with the contemporary Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali, namely an essay from Benabdelali’s volume On Translation, a volume that Hawkey had begun to translate with Marouane Zakhir. While the process of translation obviously led to the generation of […]

One of the defining characteristics of “the modern” has long been a heightened consciousness of its evolutionary position in history, a place whose cultural context encourages a reassessment of our sources of literary authority. Hard to imagine a future poetry that will be anything but modern in this specific sense, especially given political, economic, and […]