Posts by: Nora Delaney
Kintsugi: On Two New Collections by Simeon Berry
Reading Simeon Berry’s Ampersand Revisited and Monograph one after the other, one has the sense of a continuum marked with lacunae. Although Ampersand Revisited is Berry’s third manuscript and Monograph his…
Family; or, What It Means to Be a Freak
In Tod Browning’s 1932 film, Freaks, Hans, a sideshow dwarf, falls in love with the beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra, who marries him for his money and plots to poison him…
Reboot: Landscape: New England
Alexandria Peary’s Control Bird Alt Delete is her third book of poetry and winner of the 2013 Iowa Poetry Prize. It is a collection that plays with the idea of…
Protest, but Not Too Much:
Anne Champion’s Reluctant Mistress
The poems of Anne Champion’s debut collection, Reluctant Mistress, obsessively pick at the physical and emotional aspects of sexual relationships—often unhappily. The title is inspired by Cassandra, the beautiful woman…
No Reason to Get Suspicious
Let’s get this out of the way first: the writing of Paul Legault’s The Other Poems is not beautiful. I’m not sure you can call anything beautiful that features Jean-Paul…
The Angel and the Ass
Our word sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto — little song — but what we generally mean by the term is a fourteen-line poem governed by fixed patterns of rhyme…
Off-beat: Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist
Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist is a strange book: part idiosyncratic poetry manual, part disconnected personal narrative. The first line of the novel, if you can comfortably call it that, pulls…
Writing by Degrees: the Program Era
Just as Hugh Kenner’s formidable 1973 classic The Pound Era traces innovations in literature between the world wars by following the literary juggernaut Ezra Pound, Mark McGurl takes the period after World…
Kid-Gloved: New & Selected Poems by Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion has now been an acclaimed poet for more than thirty years—he won Oxford University’s Newdigate prize while an undergraduate in 1975—and has been Britain’s poet laureate for the…
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