Reviews

Is it possible to know whether the work we do makes any difference or whether the tasks and actions with which we fill our hours are meaningful? At my job […]

Fashion changes, but style remains. —Chanel   Of course, when we think of fashion we think of style. However, I am not sure, in spite of the recent efforts of […]

Ada Limón’s poetry recognizes the ways shifting landscapes throw order into chaos. In Bright Dead Things, her fourth collection, the mutable settings—from New York to Kentucky to California—serve to underscore […]

Susan Howe’s The Quarry includes ten previously uncollected essays, beginning with the most recently written “Vagrancies in the Park,” a gracious tribute to her favorite twentieth-century poet, Wallace Stevens. Covering […]

There are a host of poetry collections that challenge that old adage—don’t judge a book by its cover: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (2015), and Nate […]

In a telling scene from the opening story of Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas, a young woman corrects her aunt for calling her by her given name. “Norma,” […]

In 1995, thirty-year-old John Keene published his first book, the autobiographical novel Annotations. With its sentence fragments and snaking syntax, the book reads like a bildungsroman carved into pieces. The […]

Some forty years after Charles Reznikoff first banded together with the New York poets Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen beneath the rubric of Objectivism, he was asked what that term […]

The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar brings together twenty-seven essays, reviews, and occasional lectures, written over the past twenty years by the renowned poetry scholar Helen Vendler, the best […]

What does the end of the space shuttle program mean for America? Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight sets its coordinates by this question, and in […]

When I studied abroad at Oxford as an undergraduate, I took a course on Ulysses. I  ’d always wanted to read it, but I felt inadequate to its genius, for the […]

I discovered Lorrie Moore in the University of Georgia infirmary in 1989—that is, I found her short story “You’re Ugly, Too” in the pages of the New Yorker I was […]