Poetry

Poetry as Survival Rachel McKibbens’s blud is a book about what it costs to survive: the particular costs of surviving a violent childhood, mental illness, addiction, and the specific violences visited on women and on bodies marked as other. It is not a comfortable book. It does not offer the reader reassurance or the flattering…

The Title as Argument The title of Chen Chen’s second collection arrives as a kind of joke that is also an emergency: Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. It captures the book’s characteristic register perfectly – absurdist on the surface, devastating underneath, and using the forms and phrases of bureaucratic modernity to do lyric…

The Body as Witness Ada Limon’s The Carrying arrived in 2018 and immediately established itself as one of the essential American poetry collections of the decade. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, but more importantly, it accumulated a genuine readership of people…

The Poem That Changed Everything Published in 1922 in The Criterion and then in The Dial, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land arrived like a detonation. It was immediately recognized as something unprecedented, and its reputation as the defining text of Anglo-American literary modernism has only grown in the century since. This Harcourt edition collects The…

A Country Under Occupation, A People Gone Deaf Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic arrived in 2019 and immediately announced itself as something rare: a book of poems that reads with the urgency of a novel and the moral weight of a parable. Set in an unnamed occupied town called Vasenka, the collection follows the townspeople who,…