"Yet Nox also sounds out life: knocks from the coffin, a secret and crabbed communication, the echoic experience of reading through the repetitions and revocations of the translation and the histories it frames." Sophie Mayer • Hand + Star

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"His shtick is the ‘foggy mists of nostalgia’, infused with wash after wash of Deleuze and Derrida. Let’s imagine his self-portrait in a convex mirror: equal parts wrecking ball and Lucille Ball; strobe light and Peter Straub; stray straw and stray man." Stephen Ross on Charles Bernstein • The Wolf

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"Elegy's conservative note can too easily lead to facile verse, but these poems don't draw on its familiar 'dying fall'. They create a symbolic universe out of railway cuttings and foggy suburbs: an anti-metropolitan vision of excellence." Fiona Sampson on Sean O'Brien • Independent

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"I remember a reviewer of one of my books about ten years ago summarising with something like: 'Simic used to be funny, but now he just writes about death.' And I thought 'you just wait until you get older and go to funerals once a month, punk!'" Charles Simic in conversation with James Byrne • The Wolf

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"In 1958 he had shifted his summer residence from Ischia to a small town near Vienna, taking leave thereby, he said, of all kinds of fantasies he now felt too old for." Michael Wood on Auden • LRB

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"Buy this book as an excellent, basic introduction to Fisher’s work and for its wonderful production values, then go to the collected, The Long and the Short of It, for the range of Fisher’s immense achievement." Ian Pople on August Kleinzahler's Selected Roy Fisher • Manchester Review

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"At the site of the wound, language breaks, becomes tentative, interrogational, kaleidoscopic. The form of this language bears the trace of extremity, and may be comprised of fragments: questions, aphorisms, broken passages of lyric prose or poetry, quotations, dialogue, brief and lucid passages that may or may not resemble what previously had been written." Carolyn Forché • Poetry

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"O'Brien continues to explore the post-industrial urban-pastoral landscape he has made his own; but November also contains his most doubting and vulnerable poems to date." Paul Batchelor • Guardian

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"Poetry is the most common form of literature in Burma, and also the most censored, and poets have to be constantly inventive to evade the censors." Htein Lin and Vicky Bowman • The Wolf

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"I could never go online. I’m a dinosaur. I’m a throwback. I’m nineteenth century and we’re in the 21st century. If someone really wanted to say why bother with this book, they might say, 'This is a guy who might as well be living in 1893.'” Harold Bloom in conversation with Adam Fitzgerald • Boston Review

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"Yeats did not become Yeats by hanging out with like-minded contemporaries or by attempting consciously to distinguish himself from his forebears. Nor did he become Yeats simply because he married a complicated, intelligent woman or because he was appointed to the Irish Senate or because he engaged in psychical research. Many people might do such things, might find deep satisfaction in such things, while remaining incapable of writing a single sentence. A few people might also take equally hard-won satisfaction in rhyming their name with the word 'slates,' in rhyming their wife’s name with the word 'forge,' in arranging a single sentence into four iambic tetrameter lines whose rhythmic density asks (as the title of the poem suggests) 'To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee.'" James Longenbach • The Nation

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"In the ICFU-ist aesthetic, Frost’s hope for a momentary stay against confusion has been ditched for the sake of a momentary grooving in confusion." Mark Halliday on Tony Hoagland • Pleiade (pdf)

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"I wanted to call attention to the poetic quality of prose that seems totally prosaic, and which can sometimes suddenly grab and move you to tears while reading a newspaper or a timetable or a guide book, and penetrate that source of the awe with which we respond to poetry." John Ashbery in conversation with Adam Fitzgerald • Boston Review

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"Brodsky’s old friend Lev Loseff puts a great deal of emphasis on his subject’s decision to drop out of school, arguing that it prevented Brodsky from being ruined by overschooling. Brodsky thought so, too. 'Afterward I often regretted that move, especially when I saw my former classmates getting on so well inside the system,' he wrote. 'And yet I knew something that they didn’t. In fact, I was getting on too, but in the opposite direction, going somewhat further.'" Keith Gessen • New Yorker

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"History is necessarily inaccurate; we only can comprehend it based on the information we receive, and only can relate it to the best of our recollection. It’s a frequent point made by Herodotus, who signs off his seventh book with: 'That, at any rate, is the story of what happened.' Translation: Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but that’s what I heard." Andrew Womack • The Morning News

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"You can’t help consuming Kay Ryan’s poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back—what was that?—and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you." Dwight Garner • NYT

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"[T]his is to point out the new quandary that writers—whose notions of literary production and reception were forged in the age of the slow roll—face in the age of the bounce." Kenneth Goldsmith • Poetry

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"When Valéry, a consummate poet as well as a master of prose, pointed out that prose is to poetry as walking is to dancing, he was making the same point. Walking, especially in Valéry’s day, gets you from one part of Paris to another. Dancing is something else altogether, a mood transformed into movement. It might be what you do when you have spare time and energy enough to give something back to the cosmos or feel like adding a flourish to your travel through the day." Vincent Czyz • Boston Review

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"The achievement of a style is like the achievement of an individual poem writ large: it’s a delicate balance of confidence and guesswork, as the writer simultaneously relies on what’s worked in the past, bets on what might work right now and tries to leave a little room for things that might work in the future. It’s like baking a pie with a recipe in one hand and a wish list in the other." David Orr • NYT

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"There’s a renewed attention and clarity, a stirring, a sense that the world has finally fallen into place. Meaning invades household items: the puppy-ravaged couch, the dirty dishes, the neglected azalea bushes; all of them seem to glow with significance. The right poem at the right time can reveal the world in its glorious imperfection, can make it all seem manageable and sane. But, alas, glow doesn’t pay the rent." Luke Johnson • Speakeasy / Wall Street Journal

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"Beginning then I started to understand my flight, and those roads no one takes lest they be tempted to track some shadow, some harvest. Roads that always retain ashes as if they were a fire just now dying out, as if the road were a body shattered in the scent of jasmine left over from childhood. There is a tangled binding between me and my flight." Adonis, trans. Ammiel Alcalay and Kamal Boullata • Words Without Borders

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"Contemporary Brazilian poetry . . . is characterized by the absence of a prevailing poetics or political agenda, and for the poets, this freedom is exciting. If we consider other examples of postwar or postrevolutionary art, like the post-Velvet Revolution poetry of the Czech Republic or the post-Revolução dos Cravos literature of Portugual, the shift makes sense: aesthetic experiment and subjective experience merge after political dictatorships end." Farnoosh Fathi • Jacket

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"The entrance to the work is the entrance to adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero who reveals heroes. Tenderness as an exercise in speed." Roberto Bolaño, trans. Tim Pilcher • La Universidad Desconocida

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"The relative isolation in which the poetries of the United States and Latin America have traditionally been studied no longer fits our contemporary moment of intensified intrahemispheric cultural contact. Indeed, this isolationist model can be seen as a relic of Cold War mappings as much as an effect of language differences." Candice Amich • Jacket

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"We don’t need to reclaim a curriculum that has lost its momentum; we need to devise a curriculum that does not reduce literature to cultural exemplum, a curriculum that will make poetics and its special pleasures once again material–not only to coursework, but to the way we live our daily lives." Marjorie Perloff • Boston Review

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"All poets write in a foreign language, even when they are monolingual. And all fine poets are translators: they translate the world for us. That is, they explore it by refusing to pigeonhole it." Ilan Stavans in conversation with David Shook • Molossus

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"[A]t some point the distant past began to seem as present to me in my imagination as the recent past, personal memories, or even the current day." Timothy Donnelly in conversation with Sean Patrick Hill • Guernica

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"'Mainstream' vs. 'demanding'—often fought by critics needing to justify what they as individuals like and don't like—is a grudge match I'm not particularly interested in. This kind of poetry demands nothing other than that we observe our world more closely, think on it, feel something for it." Mark Burnhope • Stride

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"However much you prize your individuality, your autonomy from your national culture, nevertheless you’d better have an interesting national product (ball and chain?) to sell on the international market. Rather than liberating us, the process of internationalizing literature reinforces stereotypes as, faced with the need to be aware of so many countries, we use a rapid system of labelling." Tim Parks • TLS

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"[A] nation will always look differently from outside. . . . There is no reason for poets to expect their tradition to resemble itself when viewed from another country: context has changed." Evan Jones and Todd Swift in conversation with Maurice Mierau • The Winnipeg Review

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"For a country often drawn in newspapers as the backdrop of mosque and market bombings, troubled politics, and underdevelopment, the possibilities for literary expression are not grim; to the contrary, poetry seems to waft through every aspect of Pakistani life. As the 'fragrance that spreads everywhere in a subtle, almost imperceptible way, poetry transcends all borders and nationalities,' [Fakhar] Zaman tells us." Swetha Regunathan • Words Without Borders

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