To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Poetry Center, and to mark the opening of the Poetry Foundation's latest exhibition, “A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center,“ on view...
I met Kimiko Hahn in the early 1980s when Jessica Hagedorn invited us to read in a series she curated at Basement Workshop in New York City’s Chinatown. I was immediately struck by Kimiko’s poise...
In John Lee Clark’s hands, all language becomes a verb: relentless, unfolding, born from bodies and their varied interactions with each other. To converse with Clark is to examine how we think and...
In May 2018, at what seems in hindsight like the hopeful peak of the #MeToo movement—Bill Cosby had just been convicted of sex crimes; Harvey Weinstein was about to turn himself in—the classicist...
Editor’s Note: A condensed version of this interview appears in the November 2022 issue of Poetry. Will Alexander is everything. I say that colloquially but mean it metaphysically. He’s a poet and a philosopher...
A child was murdered. This particular version of heartache is very old. It’s also so common now that such news washes over us. But fires have been set, and wars fought, for lesser grievances. It’...
At 76, Alice Notley is a formidable figure in contemporary poetry, having emerged from one of the most celebrated American avant-gardes of the late 20th century, the New York School, only to forge...
The classic Black adage—that we must work twice as hard to be successful—becomes doubly perilous when one tacks on the operative phrase at living. These are the existential stakes underlying Golden Ax (Penguin...
Adrian Matejka was recently named the new editor of Poetry, the 12th person to hold that title since the magazine began in 1912, and the first Black top editor in the magazine’s history. However, his professional...
When Garrett Caples’s third collection, Power Ballads, was released in 2016, his publisher, Wave Books, described it as “bizarre and hilarious, in which Dylan and Bowie sit alongside the French surrealists...
In contemporary American poetry, all roads lead to Patricia Smith. Look, maybe some of y’all are content with unproductive detours, lyric byways, and formal parking lots, but I’m a writer and a reader...
In 2018, I went to a reading at the Library of Congress featuring five poets laureate from across the country, which remains the best poetry event I have ever attended. All five poets were beautiful...
Editor’s Note: This spring, Action Books published Swedish poet Bruno K. Öijer's The Trilogy, co-translated by Öijer and Victoria Häggblom. To mark the occasion, Action Books editor Johannes Göransson interviewed Öijer about the poet’s experiences...
Zoë Hitzig leads a double life. She’s a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University, where she has written papers on economists’ roles in redesigning public school allocation algorithms and ...
Back when we were still going to parties, I met Marilyn Chin at a party. It was 2013, at a gathering for Kundiman, the Asian American poetry collective. Jane Wong and I were munching on plates of...
Mark Nowak worked at Wendy’s for most of the 1980s. He is the author of three books of poetry—Revenants (2000), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Coal Mountain Elementary (2009, with photos by Ian Teh). He used to play in...
In I Live in the Country & other dirty poems (Four Way Books, 2020), the fifth collection by Arielle Greenberg, pleasure is out in the open. The setting is the idyllic countryside, with its animals, its rain...
Like many writers, the British poet Hannah Sullivan is also a literature professor. In her academic life, she studies literary innovation and revision and the ways in which other poets strive toward...
“More than anything, I want / the ability to respond perfectly / to tragedy—,” Paige Lewis writes in Space Struck (Sarabande, 2019), their wise and witty debut collection. In some sense, the book does exactly that. ...
About halfway through Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Aria Aber’s debut poetry collection, there is this section epigraph: “Lass dir alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken.” It’s a line ...