The poems of Mary Ruefle have often felt like delightful puzzles: slippery, full of surprise, and rich in irony, much of it self-directed. In her most recent book, Dunce (2020), she pokes fun at her own authority as a writer. “Vow of Extinction” finds her listing all that she now refuses to put into her […]

Scent evokes memory. Such strong associations with smell have prompted perfumes, the pinnacle of scent, to be banned or discouraged in mass gatherings as well as in small spaces. Elizabeth A. I. Powell’s poetry collection Atomizer, its namesake those decorative glass bottles that house expensive perfumes and permit a small amount to be released in […]

When disasters fly by faster than billboards, how are we to bear witness to them? Laura Eve Engel’s debut collection, Things That Go, has an eye for humor and tenderness, but it is an eye running out of places to look. Engel’s interrogation into the act of witness is shaped around five retellings of the […]

There’s a sense in The Melancholy of Anatomy that the grave intellect monitoring the process of the poems is skeptical of a lyric’s passion. In this way Martin Corless-Smith binds feeling in a boundary of wit and reverence; that is, one feels the conception in emotion, but the writing and revising in a temperance. Where […]

Koets’s robust emotional range and delicate intimacy are reminiscent of Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho.

Listen to the bird song. As Lipska writes,” “It’s just an untreated case of chronic echo.”

Paino excavates what meaning we create behind our acts of living, what haunts us at the furthest edges of all we carry . . . Indeed, there is an utter darkness throughout the whole of <i>Obscura,</i> in coming to grips with mortality.

In the absence of family, the self becomes sister, becomes multiple, becomes animal—more fiercely present when it is its only company and counsel, its last and most stalwart protector.