"No poet before Wordsworth paid such close attention to the way the mind actually works, the odd jumps that connect our ideas and perceptions." Adam Kirsch • The New Yorker

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"Most literary biographies are about middle-class men and women who have spent their lives in an intellectual and artistic milieu... Genet was the opposite." Edmund White • Ontario Review

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"Ted [Berrigan] picks up... the enormous consequences of introducing people to one another & being, in general, the social secretary for the club." A new take on the New York School • Silliman's Blog

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""Well, Karl has always kept his job driving trucks." How to run an independent bookstore • Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

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"This may be the point: sustained discomfort." Kay Ryan on Dan Chiasson • New York Times Book Review

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"I still consider myself a dissident." Lawrence Ferlinghetti • Los Angeles Times

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"What we do is morally significant. What we are is not." Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie • The Guardian

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"He is one of the few writers who never felt he was a writer or lived as if he were one." Javier Marias on Guiseppe di Lampedusa • Threepenny Review

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"Fortune sent him... to report on cotton tenant farmers in Alabama, and he returned with hunks of the impenetrable rock or uncut diamond that would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Phillip Lopate on James Agee • The Nation

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"I had very early a sense that sex was very complex and potentially violent." Mary Gaitskill • Nerve

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"The real question should be not which of the four available versions must a prospective reader purchase, but why a new translation in the first place? Why ever a new Proust?" André Aciman • New York Review of Books

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"Literature in translation has an image-problem." M. A. Orthofer and John O'Brien • Context

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"It will probably be my last book, but I'm very pleased." Fay Zwicky wins an award • The Age

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"He spent years trying to submit manuscripts that included that poem, titling each collection 'Death and other poems.' Each publisher, down the line, would veto the title, and Bowering would remove the title poem, and attempt it in the next." Rob McLennan on George Bowering • Jacket

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"He did what the best writers do: he wrote for himself." Robert McCrum on John Fowles • The Observer

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"[Garrison Keillor] proposes that 'the meaning of poetry is to give courage.' That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch." David Orr on the Keillor-Kleinzahler feud • New York Times Book Review

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"All poetic installments must put on display at least ten proper names that reference the flow of European Art-Wares to Atlantic-American Cultural Trusts." Silliman on Rodrigo Toscano • Silliman's Blog

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"Ekphrasis is fundamentally revisionary— a mode of seeing again." Barbara Fischer • Boston Review

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"One of the things about going to university in Oxford is that you sometimes feel as though you are a student in a tourist attraction." Toh Hsien Min on Tan Teck Howe • Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

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"It is tedious and reductive to see [Ted] Hughes as an untamed force of nature." Paul Batchelor • Poetry Matters

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"There are two nations in Canada, and I find it insulting that she doesn't recognize that we're a distinct people." Raymond Lévesque turns down an award • The Globe and Mail

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"'Coming out' stories can be seen more generally as coming-of-age stories, which is the phrase used for the straight version of the experience." Benjamin Markovits on Edmund White • TLS

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"Peter Green's Catullus is more a hate poet than a love poet. He is macho, selfpitying, cruel, technically masterful, and supremely funny." Emily Wilson • The New Republic

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"In good free verse, the juxtaposition of words matters every bit as much as in formal verse." Ranjit Bolt on Mark Haddon • The Observer

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"The bestselling poet in the US in the 1990s was not any of the giants of American letters but a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught sharia law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey." William Dalrymple • The Guardian

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"The passion and protest of an Antigone were all of a sudden as vital as oxygen masks." Seamus Heaney on translating • The Guardian

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"Art must come out of catastrophe." Kamau Brathwaite • Rain Taxi

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