"Poetry is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be violently shaken to get it running again, and if that doesn’t do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its wheels cleaned, lubricated, and its intricate moving parts made to run again. Unlike watchmakers, poets repair their poems by leaving parts behind that after centuries of use have turned out to be unnecessary to their workings. Hard as it is to believe, lyric poets are still tinkering with a contraption thousands of years old, mending it and reinventing it with no desire to call it quits. As they do that, poetry keeps changing while remaining the same." Charles Simic on Jana Prikryl NYRB

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"In Stephen Dunn’s introduction to the volume, he writes that Cummings was “the Holden Caulfield of American poetry.” That’s partly right. Cummings’s two great interests were sex and sex—at least in the first part of his life." Micah Mattix • The Washington Free Beacon

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"And if she got to know that he was giving a lecture somewhere in London she would stand outside the hall holding a placard that read, as I’ve always (and wrongly) remembered it: ‘This is the wife he abandoned.’ Sadly, but no doubt accurately, the various biographies substitute ‘I am’ for ‘This is’." Mary-Kay Wilmers LRB

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"This phrase is but one example of her highly individual wrapping up of her poems in a final terse or laconic and intriguing statement of actual fact, which at the same time is almost more aware than the reader or writer can afford to deal with. It is a form of sabotage or inversion—I am telling you something but not quite the truth as it was. As ever with Ní Chuilleanáin’s vast intellectual compass, she makes valid connections between various different registers of language, her task being to hunt down somehow the meaning of a forgotten word that is well-nigh irrecoverable." Medbh McGuckian Breac

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"On the back cover of This Big Face I wrote that the poems were ‘going for some kind of clarity.’ That’s certainly changed. Now I think life is mostly a great big shambles and I’m happy to go along with that. The earlier poems seem quite neat, as in tidily put together, whereas I think the recent poems have an unruly element to them." Jenny Bornholdt VUP

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"Drawing likenesses together, setting things at odds, offering new unending sets of variations. These things kind of matter a lot." Sam Buchan-Watts on Matthew Welton Prac Crit

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"Her example is a poetics of constant revision, movement, and the considerable courage it takes to maintain, even in times of necessary anger, the wonder that should make an artist intrepid." Karen Solie Brick

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"My friend laughed. “You know your problem?” she said. “You thought that philosophy would be Truth and poetry would be Beauty.”" Ken Chen • New Republic

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"The ‘confrontation with false universality’ that [Ben] Lerner uncovers as a way of understanding Rankine’s work is critical; though he only mentions it in passing, he in fact redefines poetry as a possibility for expressing political and other social conditions of those who create the art. But the idea isn’t new, of course." Nyla Matuk • The Literateur

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"Sitting in the same classroom where Lowell had once curled over his desk, riffing on Milton before a group which then included Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck, it was now Derek delivering mesmerizing monlogues on Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, Auden, Braithwaite, Akhmatova, and Lorca to an intimate circle, which regularly accomodated visitors like Gertrude Schnackenberg, Rosanna Warren, and a shy bookstore clerk with a stentorian voice named Sven Birkerts. But the star of the class, clearly, was a young, sizzle-eyed poet named Melissa Green, with her frenzied hair and her impassioned staccato panegyrics on Horace’s Odes delivered, sometimes, apropos of nothing but the poet’s love of Horace." Askold Melnyczuk • Drunken Boat

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"Reading The Beauty reminds me that Hirshfield spent eight years as a full-time Zen student, three of them in monastic silence. Speaking with Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, she refers to this time as “the diamond at the center of [her] life.””" Laura Donnelly • Kenyon Review

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"Then, in the summer of 1964, Bunting received a phone call from the Newcastle poet Tom Pickard, who turned up at his house an hour later. “A boy of 18, long-haired and fairly ragged, with a fist full of manuscripts,” Bunting later recounted to Dorothy Pound. “He said: I heard you were the greatest living poet.”" Christopher Spaide • New Yorker

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"So, at the end of the episode, Dwight is giving this monologue of the perfect crime, and I was just really struck by the rhythm and syntax of his monologue. Something about it struck me, so I transcribed it, and I did a sort of negative translation of that speech, and then I worked with that to produce this poem." Camille Rankine • Divedapper

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"But the organising committee got more than they bargained for when Ms Higgins sent them her work. They had, perhaps, been expecting a paean to the many glories of Galway extolling its manifest virtues as a gateway to the Atlantic coast, and an unrepentant bastion of the arts, the native language, music, dance, theatre and literature." Jerome Reilly Sunday Independent

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