With Each Breath: A Memoir of Survival
Code blue in room 241. The announcement is made in an unhurried, neutral tone. Code blue in room 241. I push my food away, jump up, heave open the heavy…
Eucharist: Dimitris Lyacos’s “With the People from the Bridge”
“A Couple and Two Children Sleeping on a London Bridge” by Gustave Dore Dimitris Lyacos’s long, tripartite poem, Poena Damni, is one of the most important and challenging literary works…
Reverse Migration
After our month-long travels across southeastern Europe, Rowan and I arrived at my brother and sister-in-law’s apartment in Ankara ready for a home-cooked meal. We were (over) fed in typical…
A Conversation on Li Shangyin: Chloe Garcia Roberts & Guangchen Chen
This dialogue took place over the course of several months in early 2015 and was published in Chinese by the Beijing-based magazine, Painting, Calligraphy, Poetry (詩書畫) that same year. In…
Knows It Knows Too Much: Jennifer L. Knox, Elliptical Compromises, and the Resolution of Humor
As long ago as 1998, Stephen Burt noticed a tendency for contemporary poets to want to have their cake and eat it too, to speak from the heart while gesticulating…
The Tiniest Ark: Jennifer Moore’s The Veronica Maneuver
You never enter the same river twice, according to Heraclitus. Likewise, in Jennifer Moore’s debut collection, The Veronica Maneuver, you never enter the same poem twice—or at least, thanks to…
“A Picture of Great Detail”: The Art of David Jones
The Orchard, Capel-y-ffin, by David Jones, 1920s “And so I make for myself a picture of great detail,” said the great Homer scholar Milman Parry in a 1934 address to…
Conversations: Laura van den Berg and Elisa Gabbert
Laura van den Berg I have known Laura van den Berg since the mid-aughts, when we both attended graduate school at Emerson College (I on a poetry track, she on…
A Taste of Immortality: The Post-Earthquake Haitian Novel
Quand on revient de l’enfer, chaque baiser a un goût d’immortalité. (When you come back from hell, every kiss has a taste of immortality.) —Yanick Lahens, Failles (all translations by…