Peter Balakian explores the relationship between the lyric and larger social movements, envisioning poetry as “aesthetic imagination [that] shadows history, shadows human experience, casts its own kind of illumination, often unromantic, sober, shadow-like in its truths.”

Art in the Age of the Adjunct In all the debate around the proliferation of MFA programs in the United States, one topic that seems particularly inducing of delirium tremens in most young writers (and likely many of their parents) is that of jobs. There is nothing wrong with the creation of thousands of “professional” […]

Michael Farrell’s 2015 collection, Cocky’s Joy, is ambidextrous, its right hand painting comic tableaux, and its left rendering cool judgments. Farrell is often described as one of Australia’s leading experimental poets. “Experimental” in American work has recently tended toward the conceptual, polemical, and grotesque. Farrell’s experiment is one in bluff intelligence and sparkling, offhand wit. […]

In Martha Silano’s stunning fourth collection of poems, readers will encounter “velvety soup,” “60,000 eggs,” and “the big bang,” the end result being poems that are as wildly imaginative as they are diverse in their subject matter.

The possibilities [Johnston] envisions for our contemporary times are far more than we deserve.

If you want a taste of the beauty of our clumsy human limitations and desires, cut through with the clean freedom of the nothingness from which all things spring, you will be richly rewarded in this collection, and may find yourself meditating on it as you would on an ancient text.

Ostensibly a catalog of Ohio’s network of railroads,Ohio Railroads takes up race, memory, language, and a history that includes the Wright Brothers, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Roswell, and every American war.