Last fall I visited Ann Lauterbach, a poet of verity and the splendid particular, at her renovated schoolhouse in upstate New York, where every corner reveals lovely and curious objects—exquisite and ...

The distance between poet and poem is wonderfully, sometimes perilously, elastic. This shrewd poem’s particularness creates an intimacy that feels both personal and social. I wouldn’t call the details ...

Culturally, poetry is used in varied ways. Haikus, for example, juxtapose images of the everyday, while lyric poetry expresses the personal and emotional. Similarly, poets themselves come in a range ...

Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

Critics and readers love the term, but it can be awfully slippery to pin down. That’s what makes it so fun to try. By Elisa Gabbert Elisa Gabbert’s collections of poetry and essays include, most ...

Flying in the face of much contemporary poetry, Nam Le’s first collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is defiantly cerebral, relishing the polysyllabic, the latinate and the esoteric. This is ...