"The net result was that Bunting was suddenly catapulted into the position of Grand Old Man of British poetry. None of which did an awful lot for his finances, and the university posts he gained in America were always temporary and the fees tempered by the demands put on him. Famously, his ‘lecturing’ was to read chunks of his favourite poets out loud to his students. And August Kleinzahler, who attended Bunting’s classes, notes that the classes got smaller, and ended up in his bungalow! But that was nothing to the scrapes he repeatedly got into with staff in North American universities." Ian Pople • Manchester Review

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"What mesmerised me was the poem’s rhythms, and the perfect ease with which the lines, long or short, contained each thought and added it to the ‘story’. And the openness of that story as confession. Lawrence’s readiness, with no hint of self-consciousness or posing, to give himself away. I had never struck anything like that either. I took it as a kind of lesson in how I might deal with my own feelings, even the ones I was ashamed of." David Malouf • Sydney Review of Books

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"The Mahmoud Darwish Museum in the Israeli-occupied West Bank opened last year on the southern outskirts of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, where Darwish settled in the mid-1990s. Last summer I scoured the glass-cased memorabilia, from his 1960s house-arrest order in Haifa and the Palestinian Declaration of Statehood he hand-drafted in Algiers in 1988 to fountain pens, manuscripts and coffee cups." Maya Jaggi • Literary Review

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"[W]hile [Maggie Nelson's] Bluets is the record of a whole cascade of fruitful ruin, it is no accident that its poetry is prose." Ray McDaniel • Constant Critic

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"Pity and fellow feeling have weakened vengefulness, or replaced it with a sense of collective, as opposed to hierarchical, experience, substituting an unexpected mildness and generosity for my earlier sternness and violence. These shifts have made the fixation on new targets a far less vigorous act—briefly rancorous but capable of generating no real energy."Louise Glück • Threepenny Review

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"I'm defiant too. I'm not going to hide. If you want to go along and beat yourself up you can do that, but I choose not to. I write from a place of honesty and my integrity is important to me."Rita Ann Higgins • Irish Independent

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"He [Christopher Reid] looks back on his time as Faber’s poetry editor with a feeling of satisfaction, but is as sure that his decision to leave while he was still doing good work was wise: “I’ve never regretted it. It seemed like the right thing to do just then. I never wanted to be the grumpy old fart shuffling about the office with people saying, 'What does he do exactly?’”" Tom Payne • Telegraph

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"It’s the most astonishing line break I’ve ever encountered. It’s the sound of a culture’s poetic history cracking in half." Glyn Maxwell on Ivor Gurney • Paris Review

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"In one important sense, modernism cast a spell to fix the future at an endpoint: our relationship with the present is a process beholden to the past." Roberto Tejada • Lana Turner

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"This is clearly a writer for whom "Milan" isn't a synecdoche for fashion or a destination on a bucket list; it's what Prospero was Duke of. Reader, I fell hard for this book." Ange Mlinko on Amanda Jernigan • On the Seawall

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"[T]he only way we can manage to 'finish' [Lyn Hejinian's The Book of a Thousand Eyes] is by closing it, knowing we will open it again." Calum Gardner • Glasgow Review of Books

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"To borrow an image from Hazlitt, [Lucie Brock-Broido] doesn't jump out of the balloon as it begins to ascend; she goes up with it in style, launched upon the unmarked air. Aesthetic heroism." Calvin Bedient • Lana Turner

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"I have always found it impossible to deal with matters of aesthetic production – inter alia in literature, art or music – without declaring such production as being subject to poetic fiat. By this I mean to see the poet (standing for the artist in general) acting as a radically free being who has decided on a statement, has declared it, promulgated it if you like, and that is that, there’s the end of it." Nathaniel Tarn • Alligatorzine

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"What [art] does not give us is answers. It gives us instead a picture. It does not ask that we analyze the picture, but that we stand before it and look, in the hope that looking might turn into gazing." Mary Ruefle in conversation with Andrew David King • Kenyon Review

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"[Jorge Luis Borges] on Wordsworth’s bad poetry: 'We must remember that he was not only a good walker, he was also an excellent skater.'" Michael Duffy • LARB

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"[Ciaran] Carson has created a thoroughly resonant, readable, allegorical work. He has given us something new: a dialectical 'renovation' of [Arthur] Rimbaud's notorious light." Matthew Ryan Shelton • Coldfront

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"The neo-liberal political economy is not real. It is violent, and aggressive because it wants to claim the space of reality in order to quantify it. What we are doing, speaking together, reading and publishing and critiquing one another’s texts, eating at tables and arguing, loving each other, giving life to one another, is already embodied utopia. That doesn’t mean it’s simple. It has to be reinhabited at each turn. This ongoing reinhabitation is the necessary amazement. It’s politics, it’s the future, and it’s happening in kitchens and in online spaces and classrooms and gardens right now. It’s a resistance." Lisa Robertson in conversation with Brecken Hancock • CWILA

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"[Mary] Ruefle is the Poet Laureate of the City of Ideas---surreal and lyrical and deeply moving at the same time." Michael Klein • LARB

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"The very first book review I ever wrote was back in 1968 or so on Anthony Hecht’s The Hard Hours for an obscure Canadian journal called The Far Point. I tried hard to explain why I thought most of the poems in this book were contrived and unsatisfactory and I haven’t changed my mind." Marjorie Perloff • Evening Will Come

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"According to critic Eliot Weinberger, [Lorine] Niedecker’s reputation after 1970, the year she died, was 'built on Xerox and hearsay.'" Hannah Brooks=Motl • Poetry

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"[T]his coherence I’m after in Zuk---however small the magazine---is not the result of chance, it is the product of long reflections about what it means to write, what it means to read: why we need such texts at a particular time, and not at any other time." Claude Royet-Journoud in conversation with Jacqueline Pluet, trans. Abigail Lang • Jacket2

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"Jarrell wrote to Lowell, 'You generally have one line in a poem when the rhythm gets not just harsh but gets tetanic like a muscle under too long tension.'" Sean Campbell • Battersea Review

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"The varying winds blew Bunting hither and thither. He spent about five years with Pound in Rapallo in northern Italy, where he also got to know Yeats, who classified him as "one of Ezra's more savage disciples"." Mark Ford • Guardian

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"[W.H.] Auden disturbs the borders of the spectrum on which we range our nature poetry. If we choose to, we can value him, rather than despise him, precisely for that disruption, for his scandalizing of more modern sensibilities. He can be the stranger at whom we wonder." Robert Archambeau • Boston Review

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"[E]ach line can be its own stanza. I find the intensity of that line extremely audacious and physically beguiling. I wanted many of the poems to have long legs." Lucie Brock-Broido in conversation with Ricardo Maldonado • Guernica

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"So Walter Pater reorganizes capitalistic success around decadent brilliance in his famous maxim, 'To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.' Any suicidal moth would support that as its dusty dressing gown went up in flame. So would Miss Havisham, lighting up like her own hymen-parade, her own white bug infested wedding slice." Joyelle McSweeney • Montevidayo

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"The title of the bilingual anthology of poetry edited by Kent Johnson and Roberto Echavarren, Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay, immediately made me want to stay at this hotel. I wanted to experience its selection of poets and poems, to read them both in their native Uruguayan Spanish and their English translations. " Laura Cesarco Eglin • The Brooklyn Rail

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"In poetry criticism, I’ve noticed a trend. It goes something like this: first, raze the field of contemporary poetry to let your audience know that, like them, you are well apprised of the fact that most poetry that’s written nowadays is dreck. Then, go on to say why the poet you’ve uncovered is different from all the dribblers out there clacking away at their touchy-feely doggerel." Joshua Marie Wilkinson • The Volta

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"Corcoran is a superbly skilled lyricist. He celebrates Greece's coastlines, meadows and mountains – the tangible, visible surfaces from which its most enduring mythologies are drawn – in passages of bucolic immediacy." Frances Leviston on Kelvin Corcoran • Guardian

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"The trouble began when Dickinson died, in 1886, leaving behind just 10 published poems and a vast and enigmatic handwritten paper trail, ranging from finished-seeming poems assembled into hand-sewn books to fragments inscribed on advertising fliers, envelope flaps, brown household paper, even a chocolate wrapper." Jennifer Schuessler • New York Times

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"This indiscriminate positivity, the blurbing good cheer, helps to explain the guilt I sometimes feel while reading [Stephen] Burt—what’s wrong with me if I cannot feel as excited about a poet as he is?" Adam Plunkett • New Republic

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