So Much Bastard Beauty
/A lovely rural landscape is seen throught urban-trained eyes in Ada Limon's poetry collection Bright Dead Things. David Nilson reviews.
Read MoreInterior, with Music
/The tension between the material and the abstract creates the complex music that threads through Ben Mazer's new volume of poetry, The Glass Piano.
Read MoreNot One to Eschew the Everyday
/From the tension between candor and formal presentation, Daniel Brown fashions the moments of discovery that comprise his new volume of poetry, What More?.
Read MoreMoving at the Speed of Love
/Poet Alex Caldiero's Some Love is tangled in the poetic complexities of love, and yet, as reviewer Scott Abbott discovers, the poems here can be every bit as fleshy and uncomplicated as the real thing.
Read MoreThe Only Relevant Thing
/Matthew Lippman's third poetry collection sings of the joys and sorrows of married life - and ventures onto broader societal stages as well. The result shows the reader in new detail a world they thought they knew.
Read MoreGrudge Sliver
/In Alice Fulton's new book Barely Composed, her poems flash across the whole of the language, whip it into a froth, playfully distort it, and sometimes bypass it altogether. Open Letters' Poetry Editor reads along.
Read MoreI Think We’re Alone Now
/Two poetry volumes - one concerned with how to be ourselves, alone, inside, the other concerned with making multifacted connections with external reality - are reviewed in a gentle dialogue with each other.
Read MoreAn Unfolding Elegy
/When sudden death claimed poet Jake Adam York at the age of 40, it cut short his life's work of commemorating all the martyrs of the American Civil Rights movement; Teow Lim Goh re-reads the man and his work.
Read MoreTempus Fugit
/Maxine Kumin, friend of Anne Sexton, master of poetic form and meter, died just before her eighteenth book was published. Maureen Thorson dives into her allusive, welcoming last poems.
Read MoreTell Me Something I Don’t Know
/Two new books of poetry take different approaches to the written word and its conundrums. Can words express the truth, or are we asking too much of them?
Read MoreOffice Space
/When we read poetry, we want the transcendence of art: how is that compatible with being at work? A new collection of poems explores the possibilities.
Read MoreThousands of Grids
/Building on his previous work, in New Poems Ben Mazer tries to find a balance between structure and fluidity.
Read MoreConnect the Dots
/What kind of reader would she be, our Poetry Editor asks, if she didn't allow herself to be susceptible to Ange Mlinko's sublime, piercing unreason?
Read MoreHome, Where the Art Is
/In "Belmont," Stephen Burt, poet of Boston's byways, offers readers verses that so court the senses as almost to confound them, shifting from technical confidence to unstructured questioning. As Kirsten Kaschock writes, "Burt attempts in these pages what Shylock did not dare" ...
Read MoreAugust 2013 Issue
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Read MoreJuly 2013 Issue
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Read MoreSecond Glance: Reticent Confessional
/Hospital visits, supermarket checkouts, and casseroles - the odd, unassuming verse of Jenny Bornholdt might leave some critics wondering if it's actually poetry at all. Critic Stephen Akey says her work is intimate yet reserved - and warns us not to expect The Duino Elegies.
Read MoreRending the Familiar
/Shane Book’s evocative collection Ceiling of Sticks shows us our familiar world in ways that might surprise even the most jaded reader into optimism about poetry.
Read More“A Crystal Stranger Taking Off Their Mask”
/Constructing a "walrus itself" is a difficult thing to do - but it's just one of the transubstantiations Ben Mirov attempts in his latest collection of poems
Read MorePoint of Origin
/"He said he would have Crispin Glover play him in a movie"--Alejandro Ventura's image-rich and always funny poetry is on full display in Puerto Rico. Joe Betz reviews.
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