Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Nick Ripatrazone

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What I like most about poetry is the second lap.
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Book Previews On Poetry

Must-Read Poetry: December 2018

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Lists Reviews

To Make a World of Words: ‘The William H. Gass Reader’

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6. William H. Gass genuinely, audaciously, absolutely loved words. Language seemed an infinite gift that he grasped. A typographic deity.
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Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: November 2018

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Autobiography of Death is a song to this grotesque sense. A spirit wandering, wailing: “Your body is now fog floating above sleep.”
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Reviews

Meghan O’Gieblyn Wryly Guides Us through the ‘Interior States’

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Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: October 2018

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The Millions Interview

A Pained Intuition and a Palpable Longing: Katie Ford on Theology, Poetry, and the Unknowable

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What prayer and poetry have in common is that they both must be revised. I think people need to witness what they are actually saying in their prayers.
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Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: September 2018

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Reviews

‘Pale Horse Rider’ Examines the Life of William Cooper, Where Conspiracy Blurs with Fact

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In a business full of paranoiacs and would-be messiahs, William Cooper is the prototype: the insider-turned-outsider, the radio show host behind a movement.
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Reviews

The Rhythm Becomes a Thing of the Spirit: On ‘Religion Around Billie Holiday’ by Tracy Fessenden

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“Catholicism puts them both into a larger musical conversation than the relay between rural South and urban North, between spirituals and swing.”
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Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: August 2018

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Asghar returns to this: Wounds are inevitable, and much of life is looking to story for closure—at least comfort. There’s an energy to her sense of elegy.
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Reviews

Living Shadows: On Asma Naeem’s ‘Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now’

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Asma Naeem considers how the silhouette rose as a powerful and economical art form—and how it captures the way we see race in America.
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Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: July 2018

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This debut by Myers unfolds as if it is in a Samuel Palmer painting: a moonlit field, blurry and dizzy at the right moments.
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Essays

A Great Short Story Has a Pulse: Donald Barthelme’s ‘Game’

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What is the syntax of a mind gone mad? Mass destruction, “Game” suggests, is always in the wrong hands—because such power stains the soul.
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Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: June 2018

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Athletic, punchy, sardonic, and swift, Hayes delivers his sonnets with a smirk—and also some sadness.
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Reviews

There Must Be Sacred Art: On Peter O’Leary’s ‘Thick and Dazzling Darkness’

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O’Leary’s project is ambitious: “The work of these poets suggests that a secular art, even in a secular age, is insufficient for representing reality completely. There must be sacred art. For poets, this means there must be religious poetry written.”
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Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: May 2018

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Scorched, palpable, sometimes pungent, sometimes brutal: Karr’s new collection is a mixture of tight narratives that end without resolution, hymns of unsettled suffering, and confused prayers.
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The Millions Interview

A Vicarious Encounter with Gregory Pardlo

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If I’m trying to capture a nuanced emotion, I turn to poetry. When I suspect there is an insight to be gained that could potentially contribute to the discourse around a particular issue, I bring my essay game.
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