News

Review: "Ryan is always clear, never coyly oblique. Indeed, there’s a relief in reading her ruthlessly specific judgments. By that, I don’t necessarily mean 'fierce opinions of other people’s work,' though she has those."
(Lit Hub)
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https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-a-brazen-poet-on-the-essays-of-kay-ryan-outsider/

Feature: "Six of the UK’s best poets reveal exclusive new work and reflect on the last year, losing relatives, long-distance relationships and 'artistic claustrophobia.'" (The Guardian)
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/08/windows-on-the-world-pandemic-poems-by-simon-armitage-hollie-mcnish-kae-tempest-and-more/

Column: Nick Ripatrazone discusses four newly published collections, including work by Isabel Duarte-Gray, Donika Kelly, Christopher Merrill, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
(The Millions)
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https://themillions.com/2021/05/must-read-poetry-may-2021.html

Essay: "[...]Adam Zagajewski was the kind of person who would offer to drop you off at your hotel after a poetry reading only to pull over midway to better focus on a conversation about poetry." —Ilya Kaminsky
(The Yale Review)
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https://yalereview.yale.edu/going-lvov

Profile: "Yi Lei and [Tracy] Smith had limited direct communications, but they treated each other dearly. In photos, they always held each other’s hands tightly, like long-separated sisters."
(The New Yorker)
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https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-second-life-of-yi-leis-poetry

Interview: "When language fails me, it means there’s more work to do — this can be frustrating of course — but what I’ve learned is you have to trust the failure of words."
(Los Angeles Review of Books)
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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-radical-love-of-the-inflamed-heart-a-conversation-with-nikki-wallschlaeger/

Review: "Parry...completely revolutionize[d] the study of Homer’s 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey,' showing that the epics had not been written, as had long been thought, but were oral — composed in the act of performance."
(The New York Times)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/books/review/hearing-homers-song-milman-parry-robert-kanigel.html

Excerpt: "But in 1950s America, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met for the first time. Both were emerging poets, and both were hugely ambitious women in a cultural moment that did not know how to deal with ambitious women."
(Lit Hub)
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https://lithub.com/on-the-friendship-and-rivalry-of-sylvia-plath-and-anne-sexton/

Essay: "['Digging'] was printed first in all the selections Heaney made from his work over the years, as though announcing a vocation for the buried: his genius, as Seamus Deane said, was 'excavatory'."
(London Review of Books)
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/seamus-perry/we-did-and-we-didn-t

Review: In a new book of lyric essays, poet Cole Swensen answers a call issued by theorists Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel: to reimagine the globe in terms of the fragile surface ecosystems that support all life.
(Boston Review)
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http://bostonreview.net/arts-society-science-nature/erika-howsare-poetry-critical-zone