Fear of Description by Daniel Poppick
★★☆☆☆ Fear of Description by Daniel Poppick is a collection of modern poetry, mixing prose and metered poems to explore what it’s like to be a young adult in today’s Untied States. Part autobiography,...
Category: Poetry
Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith
★★★★☆ For many these days, it’s easier to recognize it as a feeling than it is to articulate its many layers. It’s not quite dread, and not quite a call to arms: politically and...
28 Paradises by Patrick Modiano and Dominique Zehrfuss
★★★★☆ A few years ago, the David Zwirner gallery empire launched David Zwirner Books, a publishing imprint that would produce and distribute not only their exhibition catalogues but also the occasional book of archival...
Is, Is Not by Tess Gallagher
★★★☆☆ Its title suggests the endless arguments of two children, that something “is!” or “is not!” While we are not encumbered by mere recitation of unresolvable argument in Tess Gallagher’s collection, the reader experiences...
American Journal: Fifty Poems of Our Time, selected by Tracy K. Smith
★★★☆☆ Poetry exists in the ears of the beholder. Sound—listened to out loud or internally—grabs one first. As the words wrap into our consciousness, we begin to feel their depth and value. We move...
Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013 by Michel Houellebecq
★★★☆☆ This miserable collection of poetry compiles selections from four books by French literary giant Michel Houellebecq, condensing over two decades of lyrical melancholy into a single bilingual edition. These poems wallow in alienation...
Commotion of the Birds by John Ashbery
★★★☆☆ In Commotion of the Birds, John Ashbery’s twenty-seventh book of poetry, puzzling poems read like textual collages: meticulously arranged words and phrases torn and reassembled into abstraction. They’re enigmatic, but far from anything...
Float by Anne Carson
★★★★★ Let’s consider floating a transitional state, stuck between flying and falling. It’s the top of an arc, a beautiful moment of momentary weightlessness before crashing back to earth. Mathematically speaking, there’s a brief...
The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
★★★★★ “I, too, dislike it,” Ben Lerner writes in the opening of his essential essay The Hatred of Poetry, invoking the beginning of Marianne Moore’s short, four-line poem “Poetry.” Moore’s poem continues with a...
