"In sheer terms of semantic madness my favorite reality show title is Paris Hilton’s My New BFF." Kazim Ali • American Poetry Review

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"Magrelli's effort to understand is clearly the product of a passion fired by wit, a passion honoured in the knowledge of its cost." Sean O'Brien on Valerio Magrelli • The Guardian

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"A Prynne poem contextualises the subjective in a fragmented form and strands him at the periphery of the communicative framework." Matthew Hall on J.H. Prynne • Cordite

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"[Larkin] assertively expressed his incomprehension and reveled in his disgust over the style changes [John] Coltrane initiated." John G. Rodwan on Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin • Open Letters

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"This joyride isn't over and . . . we're all in this together." Nine poets and critics on the past decade in poetry: 2000-2009 • Poetry

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"He was a poetry scholar who drank heavily and had a wide circle of friends. Not long after Da Huang was born, Meng Yuan walked into a Party propaganda session and announced, ‘These neophytes shouldn’t be leading specialists…’" Bei Dao • Granta

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"John Ashbery may or may not be, as Rosenberg writes, 'the most eminent English-language poet alive,' but such eminence looks rather meager when compared to the distinction Jeremiah claims for himself." Adam Kirsch on the literary bible • New Republic

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"He may be doing something magnificent; he may be trying to cease the withering." Ken L. Walker on the art of William Blake

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"Then the clocks go haywire. Sometimes a day is like nothing at all and then right on its heels comes a night that is like . . . a thousand days." Rainer Maria Rilke • Paris Review

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"The cream in the instant coffee is always 'slightly sour' (100), the ice in the whiskey melting (159), the lunch hour nearly over." Marjorie Perloff on Frank O'Hara • Lana Turner

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"See what has become of me? I’ve never stopped desiring your attention." W.S. Di Piero • Threepenny Review

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"Translation is a treasuring and guardianship of border/lines: a guardianship, in drawing and redrawing our attention to what is on either side of the border, and a treasuring, in ensuring that the lines stay open, permeable, porous." The Volta Project • The International Literary Quarterly

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"The specific details – the half-empty trams, the cream tie, seem to struggle to press some vivid reality on a scene the poet seems to have half vanished from. " Peter Sirr on Luciano Erba • Poetry Ireland Review

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"The libretto is a dying art." Michael Symmons Roberts • Wall Street Journal

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"Ponsot’s own writing, like Ponsot’s version of Hopkins, can seem so self-consciously affirmative, so determined to look on the bright side, as to miss a great deal of what other people see." Stephen Burt • New York Times Review of Books

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"I realized that what she had done was suddenly complete." W.S. Merwin on Deborah Digges • Brick

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"[T]he essays demonstrate one hard way to live in language: through resistance, fidelity to attention, ethical suspicion of the drifts of mind flesh is heir to, and a tough-minded honouring of the example of the dead." Adam Piette on Geoffrey Hill's Collected Critical Writings • Blackbox Manifold

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"We may have started making stylish poems as shallow, and reductive, as the sentimentality they presumably guard against" Ellen Bryant Voigt • Michigan Quarterly Review

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"[T]his collectively drawn map of the ever-shifting territory[.]" Attention Span 2009 • Third Factory Also: No Tell 2009 best books

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"Reference, brevity, self-restraint, attention outside the self, material objects as models, Williams and his heirs as predecessors, classical lyric and epigram as precedents: all these, together, constitute the New Thing." Stephen Burt • Boston Review

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"Rooted as they are in the quotidian – in real things (often with settings in a historical past) – they always nonetheless seem deep and strange." Eamon Grennan on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin • The Irish Times

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'The bane of language, for Ashbery as for Flaubert, is the “received idea.”' "Helen Vendler • New York Times Review of Books

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"Pick up a newspaper and a sharpie, read carefully and start making your mark." Travis Macdonald • Jacket

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“'Invent a dream in which you appear as a poet.' This might be the cleanest description of Spicer’s practice of poetry: inhabiting a dream, coming to believe it." Jared White on Jack Spicer • Open Letters

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"Poetry in Serbia has managed to stay healthy despite the Serbian Association of Writers." James Sutherland-Smith • Poetry London

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"Who are these mourners processing to the grave...?" James Fenton, Alan Jenkins and others remember Mick Imlah • TLS / Oxford Poetry

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"[Stephen Rodefer's] act of creation is . . . constituted by the deliberate garbling of the standard signals of traditional form." Lindsay Kathleen Turner • Verse Online

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"He once spoke of how being 'modern' meant displaying 'new neuroses and old furniture'." Paul Reitter on the selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal • Times Literary Supplement

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"'An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.'" Patrick Kurp on Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems •The Quarterly Conversation

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"She uses abstraction to zero in on a subject rather than to dodge it. When the poems work, the place or mood Wright has set out to capture appears in silhouette." John Cotter on C.D. Wright • Open Letters

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"[I]ts editors have done more than resuscitate Romanticism. They've also made it part of a vital tradition, generative of much of the imaginative work that sustains us today." Joe Safdie on Poems for the Millennium Vol. 3 • Jacket "These are our poems as much as are the poems written yesterday." John Bloomberg-Rissman • Galatea Resurrects

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"What do poets feel about this unsteady dance with commercialism?" Leo Hickman on the use of poetry in advertisements • The Guardian

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"The central lyric dummy who speaks for all of us — that’s the lyric mode — doesn’t only speak for the sexed-up moments but for the ponderous click of a casket lid. " Mary Jo Bang on Byron • Verse Palace / Poetry Daily

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"[L]iterature is commerce between adults who think well enough of themselves and others." Jordan Davis on poetry in translation • Boston Review

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"Poetry is a bit like architecture or engineering. It’s really about holding things together or keeping them up." An interview with Paul Muldoon • Literateur Part two here

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"It is a poetic economy of a kind that forbids, and leaves no room for, emotional overflow. Instead, Oppen's feeling for human endurance stays inside the words and understatement." Richard Swigg • Jacket

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"It’s a bit young, noisy and yup for my taste." August Kleinzahler • LRB

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"[J]ust as Eliot cobbled together a poem using quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, Hindu prayers, and Arthurian legend, we would use The Waste Land to make a comic book." Ben Powis • Gulf Coast

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"As if learning new languages, by immersion." Peter Campion on Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin and Roddy Lumsden • Poetry

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'"As we have already explained conclusively, the Writings of Ern Malley are utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry.'" Christine Wertheim • Cabinet

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"A would-be poet with a thin education could do worse than enter into an affair with an intellectual fifteen years his elder." Ange Mlinko on Rilke • The Nation

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