"[McLane]is clearly having fun, providing a welcome corrective to the notion that studying poetry is a matter of tracking down all the allusions in “The Waste Land” and noting that Langston Hughes opposed racism." Michael Robbins • NY Observer "The achievement of My Poets is the convincing case it makes that a reader’s real strength is her ability to cultivate an inconsistency of taste, which McLane argues is the inheritance of maturity." Michael Lista • National Post

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"We recall Valéry’s disdainful holding up of the phrase ‘the marquise went out at five o’clock’ as an example of bad nineteenth-century storytelling. And if the modernist probed the arbitrariness of such narrative choices, the postmodernist laughed in the face of the need even to choose." Nick Liptrot • PN Review

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"Money trumps whimsy." "And whimsy trumps chance." Roundtable discussion between Sina Queyras, Elisa Gabbert, Shanna Compton, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, and Danielle Pafunda • Best American Poetry

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"Why do novelists so fear the death of the novel? Poets don't fear the death of the poem." George Szirtes • Guardian

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"In [Ancient Mariner], Coleridge takes that ancient image of human purpose, the triumphant journey to master a world, and reverses it, turns it inside out." Barbara Everett • LRB

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"When I think social media has just about driven me bonkers and start lamenting modern times, I need only consider the senseless, sensation-drunk world of the Iliad and Odyssey to realize that every age on record has been frantically moving toward self-destruction." Jason Novak • Paris Review

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"Dante is above all a love poet. He understands, as the mystics do, that the universe is either held together by chains of love or, as Lucretius would, it verges on collapsing into chaos." Giuseppe Mazzotta in conversation with Richard Marshall • 3:AM

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"What a poem does, what a lyric poem does, is stop the clock. It goes, right—we’re going to look at this moment, this epiphany, this little revelatory meditation on mood and setting. And the clock is going to stop while we do this together—that’s what is said to the reader. And the modern reader goes, Nah, I don’t want to do that, I’m busy. And when you’re reading some enormous piece in The New Yorker or the New York Review of Books about Iraq or Afghanistan, and there’s a poem on the page—you go, what’s that doing on the page?" Martin Amis • Vulture "In this age of short attention spans, poetry may end up by being the only literature people will read." Charles Simic • NYRB

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"But the lyrics are not all raw obscenity: they have something significant to say, which the careless translations slopping around the internet tend to obscure." Carol Rumens on Pussy Riot • Guardian

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"The sufferers are also eternally trapped in a mental state, whether it’s fury or hunger or humiliation; one of the definitive conditions of Hell is the inability to escape one’s interiority." Mary Jo Bang in conversation with Zachary Lazar • BOMB

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"It can even begin to seem like an effect meant to distract from the poems’ lack of ambition; in the spot where another poet might provide an insight or a confession or a disjunctive flash or an elegant turn, [Heather] Christle often delivers a random horse." Kathleen Rooney • Coldfront

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"In this book McLane comes into contact — repeatedly, playfully and with great seriousness — with verbal art, and is changed by it. “My Poets” is a delightful shock. It’s also a friendly book, inviting readers by its own example to let poems change them too, even those (like Marianne Moore) who feel they dislike poetry." Daisy Fried • NYT

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"[T]he 'basic lessons of Modernism' have not been taught, and it does not seem like they will; they are neither cuddly nor reductive enough to be incorporated into the preferred method of literature-digestion without usurping it entirely." Andrew David King • Kenyon Review

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"Most Singaporeans own their apartments. It’s hard to think of New York City as home when I don’t own a piece of real estate. This sense of contingency however is good for my poetry. Larkin stopped writing much after he bought his house." Jee Leong Koh in conversation with Rose Kelleher • Shit Creek Review

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"[William] Blake became a highly educated man, and was probably self-taught, but more than that we cannot say. His antipathy toward formalized education is well known: 'Thank God I never was sent to School / To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool[.]'" David X. Novak • The Critical Flame

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"I believe a poet should be somewhat constituted by the voraciousness of their reading habits and broad in the company they keep, to learn, to be challenged and to grow. And frankly, if someone is really reading what is being written at the moment, for there is so much good new poetry and prose and theory and philosophy etc., they shouldn't have so much time to fling shit at each other" SJ Fowler in conversation with Feliz L Molina • Huffington Post

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"[Derek] Mahon’s homecoming foreshadows his late style, the sort of discursive, secular, eco-devotional of his last three books." Sebastian Agudelo • At Length

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"The question arises: why did Dürer not write a letter? The drawing certainly took more time to compose than a note. Did Dürer believe that an image would more genuinely convey pain, or invoke sympathy?" Caryl Pagel on Craig Dworkin's Dure • Jacket2

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"There are people who prefer not to be in the fray, and I don’t blame them. But I am keen to read the signs, and if that is your temperament, you will probably interfere to the extent of your capabilities, even if you are too old for marches and occupations in front of the White House or the Central Bank.

" Hans Magnus Enzensberger • Bombsite

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"Geoffrey Hill has nonetheless expressed an admiration for 19th-century Tory radicals and on occasion called himself a Ruskinian Tory (indeed, he might even be appropriated for Blue Labour purposes if he wasn’t so difficult to read)." Nick Pearce • Open Democracy

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"[T]his is neo-confessionalism with theoretical chops." BK Fischer on Ariana Reines • Boston Review

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"Here at last, in an adroitly annotated edition, are among the finest examples of what is possible in translating Farsi into a readable and utterly urbane English." Patrick Dunagan on Basil Bunting's Persia • The Critical Flame

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"Because so many of these poems appeared in private letters, the effect of reading them is to conflate Larkin’s art with his life — a fallacy his real poetry doesn’t deserve." Morten Høi Jensen on Archie Burnett's edition of Larkin • Idiom

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"A past that ignores writers so influential in their own time is woefully incomplete, and thus my work attempts to create a more inclusive and comprehensive version of American poetry's past." John Timberman Newcomb • Inside Higher Ed

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"Directly related to Williams’ improvisational gestures, this notational manner of engagement circles around the question of how to respond authentically to an iconic author and text, while also taking on such topics as modernism, tradition, and originality." Jordan Davis on William Carlos Williams • Constant Critic

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"The line is there, I kid you not, / This dip here’s just the sky. / To see the peak you simply need / A good impartial eye." Maria Popova on JWV Storey's scientific-paper-in-verse • Brain Pickings

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"[L]ike the poetry of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Conceptualist poetics has been a necessary intervention in our current poetic discourse, designed as it is to make people sit up and remember Pound’s dictum: 'Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.'” Marjorie Perloff • LARB

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"Margaret Avison as reluctant to publish in those days as Mac Jamieson was to play, so he swapped some music for a poem to go into Applegarth’s Folly." Stan Dragland • Brick

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"The speaker does not only sympathise with the addressee. He comes on in the end to share his identity and his legacy." Carol Rumens on Peter Sirr • Guardian

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"[In WG Sebald's novels] a photograph that appears to illustrate a moment in the narrative will turn out to differ from the prose in some crucial detail; a ticket stub that seems to authenticate the narrator’s journey is in fact entirely unrelated; a page said to be drawn from the diary of some distant relative turns out to have been composed by the author himself. The effect is uncanny and deeply destabilizing, leaving the works suspended between fiction tugging on one side and fact on the other. There is something of this effect in the poetry as well[.]" Ruth Franklin • New Republic

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