Every year, since 2014, I’ve set aside a couple of months to sit down with what amounts to a long shelf of books of poetry published in the past twelve months. My goal is to take stock of the art.

What’s most remarkable about Carlos Lara’s Like Bismuth When I Enter is the palpable sense that the author is translating life into language. One could say that each poem in the collection dabbles in ...

Poetry takes the pulse of the times. These times are dark: wars raging; a pandemic that, though it has ebbed, still has everyone confused and afraid; monstrous, hate-filled social media posts ...

What exactly constitutes a poem? To some contemporary writers, one might consider a shopping list of milk, eggs, oats and tea a form of poetry. Classicists will look towards narrative epics by the ...

The summer before I started high school I happened upon a little paperback titled “Immortal Poems of the English Language,” edited by Oscar Williams. At the time, I had — barring nursery rhymes — ...