"On Saturday, I attend a panel titled 'The Russian Avant-Garde Goes Underground.' On Monday, I attend a reading of the work of three Russian poets. (I reject linear time and treat these two events as one.)" Sadie Stein • Paris Review

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"His third book, Airstream Land Yacht (2006), marks a thematic break, if not a formal one. It is also much of an improvement. The poems are still about the world around the poet, but that world is more thoughtful, more abstract, less linear, even as it maintains its locality. The music of Babstock's lines is still more important than their meaning (or else he wouldn't try to get away with lines like 'We can't know what things mean / in the place / where they're meant'), but the music is subtler." Evan Jones on Ken Babstock and others • PN Review

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"[Ezra] Pound and [Charles] Olson drive toward a choice that would proclaim, make women coequal with men. Then they turn the car. They just veer right off and you can see it happening. You see Pound kind of wobble." Rachel Blau DuPlessis in conversation with Andy Fitch • Conversant

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"When I ask about poetry’s purpose, and whether it needs to be rescued, his reply reassures. “What’s the purpose of a sport like hockey or a video game like Halo 3?”" Kimberley Bourgeois on Carmine Starnino • Montreal Review of Books

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"Pollock’s book—though it certainly espouses its aesthetic ideals with a firmness that will rankle with both those whose poetics stand at odds with them and, more moderately, those less willing to make hard-and-fast evaluative judgments—provides both a series of unusually nuanced and intelligent takes on individual poets and volumes and, taken as a whole, an erudite accounting of Canadian poetic identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries." Stewart Cole • The Urge

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"'Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work,' advised [Gustave] Flaubert. [Charles] Baudelaire did precisely the opposite." Stephen Akey • The Millions

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"Rather than spending one’s time and energy defending the value of any given genre or mode, one might instead focus on imparting a sense of maximum permission and agency to go wherever it feels hottest to go, come whatever small-minded or misogynist opprobrium may." Roundtable discussion with Eula Biss, Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, and Allie Rowbottom • Gulf Coast

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"Spring should be a time of portents and premonitions, winged harbingers (“I dreaded that first Robin, so,” as Emily Dickinson put it with characteristic ambivalence) and new beginnings." Christopher Benfey on stichomancy • NYRB

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"English poetry has taken an Oulipian turn of late, not just in Francis's work but that of Matthew Welton, Jon Stone and Jeremy Over [...] The risk is that whimsy or stylisation become ends in themselves and short-circuit these poems' capacity for drama." Aingeal Clare on Matthew Francis • Guardian

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"Like a court jester, postmodern poetry may have been accommodated by the 'establishment' more than vilified by it." Peter Monaghan • Chronicle of Higher Education

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"To be sure, RS Thomas was no bon vivant, but the prevalent caricature of the poet fails to acknowledge and even threatens to mask the quality of his verse." Alister Wedderburn • Standpoint

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"In 1957, [Siegfried Sassoon] was delighted to find a modern poet whose work – with some reservations – he liked: Philip Larkin. He nevertheless confessed: 'O, the relief of getting back to Wordsworth from these "modern consciousness" acrobatics which meet my eye everywhere. It is like living out of doors in the country after attending a party of jabbering gin drinkers'." Peter Parker • TLS

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"Should we conclude, then, that Catullus is playing literary games when he seems to be being serious about his feelings, and being serious about politics when he seems to be playing literary games?" GC Trimble • TLS

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"He also married a woman who, like [Gabriele] D’Annunzio, was not quite what she seemed. Despite bearing the name of an old Catholic noble family, Maria di Gallese was in fact not of aristocratic descent: her father was a humble French non-commissioned officer. 'When I married him', Maria later wrote, 'I really thought I was marrying Poetry.' The couple soon separated." Christopher Duggan • TLS

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"[A] true contemporary is out of joint with the times, and this alienation gives a perspective from which he sees the time in ways the time does not see itself. He sees, in particular, the persistence of the past in the present, and wishes to change or modify the present in ways that also reconfigure how we feel about the past. It’s a tall order, and contemporaries are rare. Robert Archambeau • B O D Y

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"So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in 'contemporary poetry,' an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of 'contemporary poetry,' the nebulousness of calling something a 'move,' the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on[.]" Mike Young • HTMLGIANT

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"[U]nchecked freedom produces dull literature." Jan Baetens • Drunken Boat

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"[D]iagram this, [Adrienne Rich] says—and suddenly I remember that 'grammar' and 'glamour' share an etymology in the Scots word for 'magic.' Try to diagram that." Ange Mlinko • The Nation

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"I write the best poems I can for a few years, using whatever techniques I can summon, from writing exercises to just sitting and staring at a blank piece of paper until something happens. Then at some point after a few years I take a look at the pile of poems and very strictly put aside anything I think isn’t up to the highest standards, and see what I have. If there is a book there it is done. If not, I keep working until it is." Matthew Zapruder in conversation with Carly Joy Miller, Katie Fagan, and Jen Marshall Lagedrost • Hinged

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"The new poetry won't present itself to us because we have theorized it correctly, but because the situation is new and we have entered into it alive." Joshua Clover in conversation with Brian Ang • Studio One Reading Series

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"Unlike interpretive analyses, which more often than not are glass-bead games or fulfillment of tenure-track requirements, a genuine commentary enhances the pleasure and the understanding of the text. Moreover, it serves a public purpose." Lev Loseff • Yale Books

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"So Matthew Arnold is terribly out of favour among contemporary poets. I myself find much of his poetry unreadable. But what a shock in the letters!' Amit Majmudar • The Dark Horse

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"In the breathless rush of [Guillaume] Apollinaire’s lines, insouciant lightness and song are never far away." Christopher Winks • Bookforum

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"[Stephen] Mitchell again and again in his introduction feels compelled to apologize for the violence and mayhem of the Iliad’s story line, as though his readers cannot handle it. But his readers? Citizens of the most belligerent nation on the globe, from waterboarding to drone flights from one presidential order to another, who can participate in violence twenty-four-seven on their television screens, and if not from reality shown on screen then in the extraordinarily prurient violence of filmed fictions." Charles Rowan Beye • Arion

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"The poet Yvor Winters defended Baudelaire against accusations of decadence by comparing him with Shakespeare. Both he and Shakespeare had the ability to portray the unlovely manifestations of man’s animus." David Yezzi • New Criterion

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"Symmons Roberts has a gift for seeing the spirit in things even (as can happen in life) at unlikely moments and in bad weather (cars are unexpectedly present in his work – there is even something pushing an epiphany in a karaoke bar)." Kate Kellaway • Observer

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"Dorn’s time in England marks a period of great intellectual ferment, in close relation to Prynne and drawing on the example of 

Charles 

Olson, with 

the 

common 

aim 

of 

inventing a 

language 

of poetry which could extend from the smallest desires of daily life to the largest economic, geological and 

 cosmological perspectives. Whereas Olson

 sometimes tends towards grandiosity in The Maximus Poems, and Prynne towards work of an icy remoteness, Dorn plies such various discourses much more freely, funnily, and charismatically." Matthew Sperling • London Magazine

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"[B]oth Pound and Olson drive toward a choice that would proclaim, make women coequal with men. Then they turn the car. They just veer right off and you can see it happening." Rachel Blau DuPlessis in conversation with Andy Fitch • The Conversant

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"He went from wunderkind to alte meister. How many can say that?" Evan Jones on Daryl Hine • The Malahat Review

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"By expanding Dante’s concentrated original, [Clive] James often dulls its effect." Joseph Luzzi • NYT

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“Red Doc> might fail as a novel — did it want to succeed as a novel? — but it succeeds as linguistic confrontation." Daisy Fried • NYT

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"So-called 'avant-garde' poetry is never an innocent dalliance, free of the marketplace. It’s a bet against the present, a bet on future appreciation." Jason Guriel • Parnassus

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"It remains, nonetheless, a fundamental ambition of mine that my poetry will exercise some influence of a political character over living individuals, now, in this world, and that it will contribute meaningfully to creating, sustaining and enriching a vibrant communist public culture, in which it is a loyal and constant ambition to break down the forms of social paralysis and injustice, as well as of self-interested mastery and of exploitation, which under capital adulterate all of our relations with each other, even the most intimate [...] But I suspect that what will continue to happen, for a long time at least, is that lots of anxious and conservatively rather than radically narcissistic poets will go on writing verse which, with more or less justification, is meant to encapsulate and preserve in the aspic of sentimental memory and sensation the trivia of working-week-life and their surface profundities, poems that may only distantly touch upon the complexity of social relations, and then with a defensive, pretty archness." Keston Sutherland • The White Review

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"Ireland has no equivalent of the Pléiade, the career crowning glory laid down on bible-paper bound between leather-tooled covers, yet here within the burnished gold covers of the New Collected Poems, heightened in their intensity by the claret coloured hues of the end papers and lettering, we have a volume that will glow on our shelves for generations to come." Clíona Ní Ríordáin on John Montague • Southword

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"Ad hominem attacks miss the point, but a passion for the well-being of poetry requires discrimination between the good enough and the best. Poets are, of course, notoriously short on epidermis." Gwyneth Lewis and others on Carmine Starnino and others • Poetry

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"A while back, not too long ago, we found ourselves in the era of French criticism and the “unreading” of literature. And a lot of bad poetry." Stephen Dunn • Georgia Review

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"There are few glimpses of the cold, wounded observations that marked the poet’s first books, more than a quarter-century ago — the canny social malaise, the slightly bitter tone, the whiff of misery, the suspicion of what the world offers, all reminiscent of Larkin without being slavishly indebted. These have been replaced by knee-jerk politics, third-rate knockoffs of folk tales and a vision of England where Sunday cricketers still gather on village greens and bell-ringers yank the ropes in the local church. Duffy is pure Labour in her politics (old Labour, that is), but cheerfully Tory in her postcard views." William Logan on Carol Ann Duffy • NYT

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"Carson offers an exquisite contribution to the continuing evolution of this liminal text" Lucy Hinnie on Ciaran Carson's Rimbaud • Tower Poetry

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"This is a commanding book, and its first and last poems especially stand out: “Torment,” a biting narrative about narcissistic students, and “Ask The Poetess,” a hilarious parody of advice columns and the poetry business." Matthew Brennan on Daisy Fried and others • NYT

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"Don’t play the victim card, now the staple of much of what passes for poetry. Where, after all, are those virtuous beings, those sages who stand outside the capitalist system, refusing to accept any of its goodies? Are you and I really not complicit?" Marjorie Perloff • Poetry

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" if translation hadn’t already existed as a practice, post-structuralists would’ve had to have invented it." Joshua Weiner • B O D Y

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"Visually the work is off-putting, surreal, an art object: straggling red and black blocks of text, ostentatiously hand-written in all-caps with huge gaps and irregular punctuation. This is a work intended be considered as is, not simply as a guideline to performance." Jennifer Thorp on Anne Carson • Manchester Review

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"In the future, [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]" Jeanine Webb • Armed Cell (scroll down)

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"I see a huge shift in my generation towards the poem as opening onto other genres, multimedia, the incorporation of the internet, the insertion of the visual." Adam Fitzgerald in conversation with Barbara Claire Freeman • OmniVerse

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"Oscar Wilde agreed with Matthew Arnold that in the 19th century, criticism created the 'intellectual atmosphere of the age.' In our 21st century, even though the reach of single review websites cannot match that of the mass media, working together (rather than against one other), the two can enrich, not deplete, our shared cultural discourse and thus the intellectual atmosphere of our age." Linda Hutcheon • Irish Times

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"All sorts of writers are making things under the sign of poetry that don’t necessarily resemble poetry and definitely don’t resemble each other. Ten years ago much of this writing wouldn’t have been signified under the name of poetry. It’s reckless and outlandish and often malformed. And exciting and invigorating. And because of this recklessness none of us have any idea what will happen ten years from now." Steven Zultanski in conversation with Kristen Gallagher • Jacket2

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"When will we be able to think of Palestinian poetry beyond war, cold or hot? Even these words I write seem, paradoxically, to cement the notion that Palestinian literature is only about politics, catastrophe, and survival. When will we embrace Palestinian literature for its vision of exile, not as nostalgia but (as Judith Butler says of Darwish’s poetry) as a signpost for the future, for the strangers we are, the stranger within and without us?" Dara Barnat, Fady Joudah, Tala Abu Rahmeh and Marcela Sulak • LARB

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"I’m interested in older poetic forms in an almost Benjaminian sense, as artifacts that have outlived their world, which when resurrected Frankenstein-style bring certain utopian resonances as well as modes of critique to bear." Joshua Corey in conversation with Stephen Ross • Wave Composition

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"We developed these modules in the spirit of play, which we hope carries over to their use. The constraints are meant to focus but should not stifle experimentation and openness." Compass Poetry Modules • High Chair

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"Otherwise strong poems feel let down by a slight obviousness of description, thus ‘no scarecrow looks like another/ some are tall, some small’ (‘The Village of Scarecrows’), ‘I’d rent a room in hilly Alfama’ (‘The Blue Hammock’); at other times however, and sometimes within the same poem, this clear-sighted aspect and simple description takes on a unique and uncomplicated truthfulness: ‘The seagulls are huge there, and musical’ (‘The Blue Hammock’), and ‘the silver birch with my initials stretched/ upward to its far-off father, the moon’ (‘The Blue Hammock’)." Laura Webb on Matthew Sweeney and George Szirtes • Manchester Review "Horse Music is not a book of essays in verse—factual reportage or encyclopaedic articles reshaped into scanning stanzas." Patrick Cotter on Sweeney • Southword

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"Wallace Stevens was not a trained philosopher, but his desires were philosophic. Mostly, he hoped-against-hope that Idealism would turn out to be true—that consciousness would be found to account for the whole of one’s experience." Denis Donoghue • Hudson Review

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"How to talk about death without resorting to cliché? The formal territory of the social or public seems so inherently inadequate or badly-equipped, in the language of the commonly understood and inherently unspecific, for the subject it must propose to tackle." On Denise Riley and other poets • The Literateur

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"He intersperses his vivid sketches of the lives of the poets with travelogues of his journeys through the Italian countryside to their ostensible homes and birthplaces; extensive cultural trivia; a number of elegant ad hoc translations of Latin poetry; and wild if memorable palaces of historical fantasization built on the homelier facts of his subjects’ lives. And in doing so, he accomplishes something that every classicist aspires to do, but few actually achieve: he brings the literature of the classical world to life for the curious but otherwise uninformed reader." Spencer Lenfield on Gilbert Highet • Open Letters Monthly

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"Nicholas Moore, the son of a famous man – his father was philosopher G.E. Moore – had been a famous poet, once, briefly." Martin Sorrell • Fortnightly Review

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"The fact is that while I find it hard to imagine translating Dante’s famous Lasciate ogni speranza… any other way than “Abandon all hope” (curiously introducing this rather heavy verb where in the Italian we have a simple lasciare, to leave) here I just can’t imagine any reason for not reorganizing La speranza non abbandona mai l’uomo, into Man never never loses hope." Tim Parks • NYRB

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"For all the archness and cleverness, however, such images betray a serious and incessantly inquiring mind that seeks out epiphanies almost anywhere, analysing feelings, objects and the behaviour of others to the point of paralysing uncertainty." Ben Wilkinson on Emily Berry • Guardian

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"It says more about us than it does about Katherine Philips that, confronted with this kind of argument, we instinctively assume it must really be about sexual desire." Austen Saunders • Spectator

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"[Robert] Kelly names every thing one and many. The lover and beloved become the names of each thing: in, out, path, rose, and flesh." Jordan Reynolds • Rain Taxi

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"When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it’s a lineated or prose poem, but I don’t think I can explain how. It’s like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants." Matthea Harvey in conversation with Louis Bourgeois • Rain Taxi

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"In the late 1940s, he came up to Dublin to take a much coveted job in the civil service, and the books he bought there–just a couple every year–are still on the shelf. They are all paperbacks. Wilde’s Salome, Shaw’s Man and Superman were bought in 1949. These were followed by Dante, The Greeks by Kitto, Spinoza by Stuart Hampshire, Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist, all the way to Sophocles and Rousseau in 1953." Anne Enright on censorship • LRB

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"Eliot did not wait to be instructed by one of his sages, TE Hulme, that people are divisible into two groups: those who believe in original sin and those (with their master, Rousseau) who don’t. Every other difference arises from that one. Eliot’s most formidable essays during these years, those on Dante (1929), Baudelaire (1930) and Pascal (1931), explicate the terms of his new sense of life, notably his belief in original sin and the irresistible force of his conversion." Denis Donoghue • Irish Times

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"Wherever they were found, what these artworks express is the nature of relationships. The relationship of women to their own bodies, and bodily changes, especially around childbearing. The human relationship to wild animals, at a time when all animals were wild, and we depended on them. Also, there is the relationship to spirit animals and otherworlds. (The grave goods of one boy suggest he was a shaman.) We are still preoccupied with our own bodies; it is the Paleolithic link to animals we miss." Kathleen Jamie • Guardian

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"One of the theoretical planks of Acmeism involved a certain trans-historical literary synchronicity: all poets from all ages were spiritually alive and available to the Acmeist, in a sort of Bergsonian omnipresent time-continuum. As Mandelstam put it, "We don't want Ovid translations--we want the living, breathing Ovid!" Henry Gould on Osip Mandelstam • Critical Flame

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"But the astonishing energy and the unprecedented self-examination of the letters create a problem: as in the case of Hayley’s Cowper, only to an extreme degree, the biographer’s dilemma is that the best Life of John Keats remains the letters of John Keats." Jonathan Bate • TLS

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"This, I think, is the best catchall description of Carson. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she is always a “visiting [whatever].”" Sam Anderson on Anne Carson • NYT

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Why is the retrospective volume of Poems the best place to start if you want to like [John] Milton? The answer is that it shows not Milton turgidulus, or Milton the sage and serious defender of republican learning, or Milton the achieved polymath, or Milton the heretical crank. It shows Milton in the making. Colin Burrow • LRB

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"Madness, Rack, and Honey reads like a steroid-boosted version of a commonplace book, those thinking persons’ scrapbooks that became popular in early modern Europe and contained quotations from the classics, scraps of conversation, poem fragments, recipes, proverbs and lists of every sort." David Kirby • NYT

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"A Collected Poems of Edward Dorn, the American poet who died in 1999, is a necessary and overdue publication, and, whatever the circumstances, the fact that it was not published in U.S.A. suggests that there is something very wrong with the local culture over there, a fact of which Ed Dorn was very much aware." Peter Riley Fortnightly Review

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"A book requires literacy; a drawing demands only eyes. 'Gary, my sponge, toddles beneath a happenstance of ugh' is composed of semantic units that cannot help but signify, so that you have meaning and meanings and meaninglessness and texture and sound, whereas [insert squiggle here] simply is. And so on." Nico Alvarado on Michael Gizzi • Jacket2

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"In poetry, language moves the way it does in dreams, where everything is superimposed very rapidly on everything else." Medbh McGuckian • Irish Examiner

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"[I am] slightly disheartened by what seems elsewhere like a wilful uninterest in the history of alternative British poetries by some writers. . . . Or they are looking to American work only as if none the things we talked about earlier mattered. Less sympathetically, it's easier to isolate one's genius than to have to admit that the thing has been done before and done better." Rupert Loydell and Robert Sheppard in conversation • Stride

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"There's an entrancement with language and rhythm, a generally elevated tone, and a concern with national identity in "Words" which carry echoes from Welsh poetry, past and future." Carol Rumens on Edward Thomas • Guardian

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"[I]t does appear that there is a kind of gap between what metricians will agree to call rhyme and what readers can recognize as rhyme. For most readers, these lines by Prynne make a rhyme, and no amount of Kenner, Samoilov or Zhirmunsky will persuade them otherwise. In dominant theories of rhyme, we are in the presence, in fact, of a metricization of rhyme." Simnon Jarvis • Thinking Verse (pdf)

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"Temporal freedom gives Welsch the scope to get to grips with the past in the same way as the present and enables him to hone in on the continuities that give his Waterloo its distinct identity, making this pamphlet about more than just the thoughts of a young man in a small town, trying to find out who he is and contemplating which members of his family might inherit 'the more valuable porcelain owls.'" Anthony Adler • Sidekick

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"The world of [Robin] Robertson's poems tends to be one governed by unfathomable and harsh impulses and imperatives, whether they're dealing with mythic characters or those from our own reality." Adam Newey • Guardian

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"[I]t comes as no surprise that one of the echoing voices behind these journal entries should be that of Charles Dickens. The administrative world of the Circumlocution Office where the files 'in multiple copies, of official forms, waiting to be processed. . .impede the corridors and every square inch of space. . .[a]nd everyone smiles' can only be escaped by the 'minor copyist at the Ministry of Documents' who gets out of the building at mid-day[.]" Ian Brinton on Martin Anderson • Eyewear

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"To what extent is Proust — or Beckett, or whomever a Carson book recruits — an interchangeable signifier of hefty, high culture? Discussing the typical Paul Auster novel, James Woods elegantly describes the maneuver: “A visiting text — Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett — is elegantly slid into the host book.” Whom, I’ve started to wonder, will Carson host next? What is there to quote?" Jason Guriel on Anne Carson • Poetry

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"He was asked why he thought heretics were persecuted. His answer – that heretics are the only ones who really care about religion – gives us an insight into his humour, the breadth of his sympathy, and the integrity of his poetry." Patrick McGuinness on Ed Dorn • Guardian

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"I have to admit I felt stricken by them. I could see at once that they were amazingly good, but also that they were good in ways that were going to have a calamitous effect on all my assumptions about poetry." James Lasdun on Michael Hofmann • Poetry

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"All eight of these writers know that material struggle is what is demanded instead--if poetry can reflect this need through a real and sometimes violent force of love, then perhaps there is something to be done with it." Samuel Solomon • Lana Turner

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"To her thousands of fans, [Patricia] Lockwood is famous for being the funniest person on Twitter. But she's a poet first, with a Popeye fetish and a love of lilt." Michael Robbins • Chicago Tribune

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"Let the genres blur if they will. Let the genres redefine themselves." Carole Maso • Barcelona Review

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"You can talk about Ralph and his work in all sorts of ways. Most visibly, there’s Ralph as political activist. There’s also the way in which he figures forth Lorca’s idea of duende – often in the paintings that incorporate words, and especially in the Sangro sequence; but also in a monumental piece like Black Phoenix. “All that has dark sounds has duende.”" Bill Manhire and others remember Ralph Hotere • NZ Listener

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Brodsky famously suggested that Mandelstam's development as a poet was steady, until he was broken by the juggernaut of Soviet history. His always-subversive poetry took on a terrible acceleration subsequent to his arrest and exile. Mandelstam's voice gave us both the epigram to Stalin and the ode. James Stotts on Osip Mandelstam • Critical Flame

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"[T]here was a common feeling that verse was something given one to write, and that the form it might then take was intimate with that fact. That's what I at least meant by, 'Form is never more than an extension of content.'" Robert Creeley in conversation with Lewis MacAdams and Linda Wagner-Martin • Paris Review

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"I realized that by saying so little, Warhol was inverting the traditional form of the interview; I ended up knowing much more about Buchloh than I did about Warhol." Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Mark Allen • The Awl

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"The younger looked up at dad, and father nodded to son, and son blurted: 'Sell me the English major!' Through my brain's murk, I searched for the hype. Failing to find it, I confessed: 'It makes you weird.'" Eric G Wilson • Chronicle Review

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"Marianne Moore was approached by Ford in 1957 to come up with a name for the car that ended up as the Edsel, after Ford’s son, passing up the poet’s suggestions like Utopian Turtletop, Mongoose Civique, and Pastelogram—an instance of going from bad to verse[.]" Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula • Boston Review

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"[Marjorie Perloff] departs from many of her contemporaries, who in their valuable critiques of 'Close Reading' have sometimes lost the poetry baby in the contextual bath water. Indeed, Perloff swims against the tide of cultural and historical criticism that focuses more on the bath than the baby, leaving poetry to take a bath, that is get soaked, while the aesthetic languishes high and dry." Charles Bernstein • Jacket2

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"[Nicholas] Roe’s Keats was not so attached to the ideal of beauty that he would overlook or ignore its earthly embodiments (indeed, the folly of so doing is a central part of the meaning of Endymion). Roe underlines the avidity of the young Keats for sexual experience, a trait perhaps traceable to his mother, who was much given to 'pleasure.'" David Womersley • Standpoint

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"Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries--must pay for it with a proportionate price." Walt Whitman • Byliner

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"Known to adherents as 'the science, 'pataphysics is a system in which there are no rules, only exceptions (or, more properly, where each exception creates its own rule), and where everything is equivalent—nothing is more important than anything else." Andrew Hultkrans • Bookforum

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"[I]n [Marjorie] Perloff’s work, literary writing has always a strong procedural and programmatic dimension, which links the materiality of the text to the ideality of a concept, a project, a poetics." Jan Baetens • Jacket2

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"He was secretly happy to live only a short drive from Buffalo Bill's grave." Tom Raworth on Anselm Hollo • Independent

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"Why should one want to get close to such a man? Mainly, perhaps, because of some very fine poems." Alistair Fowler on Wyatt • TLS

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"Marjorie Perloff's minute readings of the linebreaks of Williams and Oppen remain models of sheer inspective energy and should be required reading for young poets." Richard Sieburth • Jacket2

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"My point is that Kalogeris’ Dialogos challenges and renews the trope of internal dialogue. The strategy is not dissimilar to how Carson’s Nox was supposed to work, with Catullus’ poem at hand to extend her speaker’s compass." Daniel Bosch • The Rumpus

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"On the one hand I have always felt the most important thing that a writer should do is to write something that people will understand. But I also want to write poetry that expresses my usually tangled thoughts without condescending to a reader." John Ashbery • Spectator

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"[Marcus Wicker] also fuses hip-hop’s restless dexterity, its as-if-improvised fusion of amazement and momentum and force, with an ability to reward the less purely propulsive experience of reading on the page." Jonathan Farmer • Slate

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"He begins with Charles Olson’s poetry and prose protests against historical architectural negation in Gloucester, the Massachusetts fishing town he called home. Buildings he loved and believed held important meanings for the common good of the local future, were razed. But thanks to an editor who shared his devotion, urgent issues were brought up, and the documentary record provides a fine example of commitment by someone with roots in a particular place." Barbara Berman on Poets Beyond the Barricade • The Rumpus

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"In Durcan’s hands poetry become a method of personal and political liberation rather than a narrowband 'CB'-style conversation between intellectuals determined that no one should overhear them or break their code—to discover perhaps that nothing of consequence, even to the poets concerned, is under discussion. His poetry moved towards public engagement in a period when many of his contemporaries were retreating into high mythologising, theological hankering, and the marginal comfort zone. Failures are inevitable when risks are taken and one thing that is undeniable about southern Irish poetry is that it has not failed half enough of late. Durcan’s failures have done more for Irish poetry than many a safer, more equilibrious poet’s triumphs ever have." Dave Lordan • Southword

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