Category: Poetry

(by Bhanu Kapil) It’s been a while since I’ve read poetry other than the poems that are in the New Yorker, and so maybe I was extra grateful for Eunsong Kim’s foreword and Emgee Dufresne’s “afternotes”, both of which were helpful in providing context/points of orientation for Kapil’s text. In the foreword, Kim writes about…

I think my favorite poems tend to be about seeing/looking rather than feeling/being, whether the seeing is real or imagined. A lot of the poems in this collection are more on the feeling/being side of things; many of them are about moving through the world in a body that is Black, queer, and HIV-positive, and…

The poems/prose pieces in SoundMachine are largely concerned with writing and parenting, and as a result I think I liked this book a bit less than I liked the other book of Zucker’s that I’ve read (The Pedestrians). But there’s still a lot of interesting stuff in SoundMachine, even if I find it less personally…

I picked this book up at the library several months after reading Dan Chiasson’s piece in the New Yorker about Zucker’s work. I think it was Chiasson’s characterization of Zucker as a city poet that made me want to read her: he compares her to Frank O’Hara, and says this: “A city poet is a…

I have a hard time with John Ashbery’s poems, but I keep trying anyway. I think the problem is that I like to read poems that are more recognizably set in this world; I like poems that are “about” everyday life but told in a way that focuses on luminous detail, or that somehow makes…

This book takes its title from a phrase from Henry James, which features as the book’s epigraph: James wrote, in The Sacred Fount, about “the liaison that betrays itself by the transfer of qualities” from one person to another. Ronk writes about this idea more broadly, applying it to things as well as people: what…

The 44 poems in this volume are a mixture of city-poems and myth-poems; characters and allusions (Orpheus and Eurydice, Dante) recur, along with images (two different poems include the image of “a tree half aflame” inside the speaker). Phillips’s language is one of gorgeous rhythms, whether the syntax is straightforward or more complicated: “Tonight I…

I like the humor and matter-of-fact tone of a lot of the sixty-five poems in this book, like the great simile below, which comes from “How we came to live where we live”: as when you stand before a painting in a museum for as long as you hope says something good about you, even…