Coming of Age Through Adrienne Rich
In 1975, when I began my graduate work at a large Midwestern university, Adrienne Rich’s groundbreaking essay collections hadn’t been published yet. That year, my twenty-fourth, had been a watershed….
Call for Submissions: Adrienne Rich Feature
In the March-April 2015 issue The Critical Flame will commemorate the third anniversary of Adrienne Rich’s passing with a special multi-essay feature on her poetry, criticism, feminism, and politics. CF is currently accepting submissions of…
Fluency, Fractures, and Fabrication in Cathy Park Hong
photo by Harold Abramowitz The language spoken in the Desert is an amalgamation of some 300 languages and dialects imported into this country, a rapidly evolving lingua franca. The language,…
Mapping Kei Miller’s Zion
photo by Georgia Popplewell The British Isles are finally taking notice of the young Jamaican poet Kei Miller, whose third book of poems, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way…
I Didn’t Realize I had Written These: Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets
Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets is a landmark collection, central to her mammoth oeuvre, whose reverberations continue to be felt in the contemporary generation of poets. Eschewing the epic accounts, full of…
Claude McKay Walks in Ferguson
Claude McKay addresses the Kremlin, 1922 Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, is the first modern master of the sonnet form. Yeats of course had turned out a few—one a…
The History of the Wanderer
When I was four my family moved from our modest ranch house in Florissant, Missouri, to a larger two story home on an acre of land in Fairfax, Virginia. This…
To Revive the Lyric: Hoa Nguyen
From the technology of printing to the economy of grants and the politics of academia, literary culture exists in complete continuity with the rest of contemporary society. It is susceptible to the same virtues, biases, limitations,…
Paradise on Earth: T. J. Jarrett’s Zion
There is a body at the center of Zion, T. J. Jarrett’s new collection of poems, winner of the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry open competition. To whom this…