Reviews

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 museums and a handful of critics, how many of us—no matter how educated, open-minded, or sophisticated we may believe ourselves to be—have fully accepted that […]

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 the speaker’s turbulent feelings of loss. Limón’s speaker ties her self-conception to landscape. She says, “This land and I are rewilding” and “Now, we take […]

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 diverse topics, The Quarry also includes a discussion of Hope Atherton’s captivity narrative and an extended contemplation of iconoclastic filmmaker Chris Marker’s documentaries, with the […]

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 Marshall’s Wild Hundreds (2015) are but a few recent releases that are as gorgeous as objects as they are powerful in language. The cover of […]

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,” the character until this moment known as Nemecia, says, “My name is Norma.” Nemecia is at the center of the story: a figure at once […]

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 protagonist, an African American youth growing up in St. Louis during the Seventies and Eighties, is part of a “generation that lacks more than a […]

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 meant to him. His response, for the reference work Contemporary Poets, tells us a great deal about the poetic intentions of that small, stylistically disparate […]

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 known “close reader” of lyric poetry today. Almost all of the chapters focus on modern and contemporary American, English, and Irish poets—some of the poets […]

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 an attempt to answer it, Margaret Lazarus Dean journeyed to the Kennedy Space Center in 2011 to watch the last three space shuttle launches. She […]

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 act of reading Joyce’s novel brings with it heaps of intimidating baggage: the endless stream of critical appraisal; the stories concerning its publication; the well-known […]

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 reading in the waiting room. The story made me forget the sinus infection that brought me there, and made me laugh, as when one of […]

From the beginning, I knew there could be trouble: a box of cheeky new books on my doorstep, all dressed in their shiny covers, waiting to be read. All week I had been ranting about the contemporary world—its lack of tradition, its misuse of grammar, its insidious technologies. One television ad talked about the motel’s […]