poetry
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He was the first poet I read exhaustively. He was like my first poet love in that way. He was strange and unknowable and I was excited by his sudden confessions, which seemed improper, too intimate for our level of familiarity. I met him in a college poetry class. My teacher Jennifer Willoughby brought in
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I love this book because it does not let go–of its concerns, of the reader. I love this book because it tells the same story any number of times and each iteration is unique, horrifying, ruining. I love this book because it tries to be sexy sometimes when it thinks you’re looking at it. I
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I was already a fan of Adrienne Rich when I read this book, but it became the book that, for me, solidified my connection to her. Reading it some thirty years after it was written, I felt like I could see some of the work in it, some of the intentions, some of the politics,
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Another grief sequence today, but this one is somewhat different. While mourning the loss of a father, the speaker of these poems turns to the natural world, where memories of animal encounters and dreams of animal encounter abound, as well as subtle explorations of flowers and plants, all leading toward a zen understanding of the
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This collection will destroy you. It is such a finely wrought, spot-on exploration of grief–grief over the death of children, two of them, which is always unimaginable, if you’ve ever loved a child. In a steady sequence of brief, lyric poems, Catherine Barnett reifies this grief through objects, dreams, tableaus. The tableau is actually such
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This book has stayed with me since I read it. Ben Lerner’s extended prose and verse sequences are strange, interesting. They dazzle with wit and then clobber with heavy truth. Some of the prose pieces are smart microessays on culture, and the book as a whole takes a critical stance to our post 9/11 American
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