On Verse
A Ringing Echo: The Poetry of Caitlin Doyle
Caitlin Doyle’s poems are not always what they appear to be, and this subtle shape-shifting quality is exactly what makes them so revelatory. As poet and critic Abriana Jette has…
The Glam and the Gloom: Cynthia Cruz’s Wunderkammer
Cynthia Cruz is in the midst of producing an important body of work. Wunderkammer is as much installation art as it is a book of poems, or it is as…
Text Within the Text: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
So I dismantled it. Mounted it and then dismantled it but its uncanniness its Nessie in Loch Ness-ness lurks and snuffles and sways. —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ledger 1 Rachel Blau DuPlessis’…
A Reluctance to Cede Ground: Age and the Writing Life
“…so blow a kiss to this drowned world. The gods have spoken: yield.” —Maxine Kumin, “Going Down” In her introduction to A Story Larger Than My Own: Women Writers Look…
The Impassive Listener: Rusty Morrison
A chainlink is an apt image for the way concepts and objects become a single edifice, the way objects and meaning create boundary and enclosure, the way perception becomes partition…
Of Grievance and Grief: Marilyn Chin
I first encountered Marilyn Chin’s poetry through a video clip from the San Diego Border Voices Poetry Festival. In the clip Chin—with her wild wavy hair and red lipstick—faces the…
Built of Voices: Kiese Laymon and Leigh Stein
Kiese Laymon and Leigh Stein do not appear to share much in the way of common experience. Laymon is a black man from Mississippi; Stein is a white half-Jewish woman…
6 Meditations Toward an Appreciation of Lynne Savitt
1. To Begin with Freud There’s a famous (or infamous, and possibly apocryphal) Sigmund Freud quote, which is also posthumously attributed and likely offhand: “The great question that has never…
404: Identity Not Found
In March 2008, a month shy of his forty-fifth birthday, the critic and poet Reginald Shepherd was battling an aggressive form of colon cancer. The disease had already metastisized to…