"For Baudelaire, nothing in the teeming city is beneath the notice of poetry, and so it is for Symmons Roberts." Katharine Towers The Compass

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"However there is now a growing clamour urging policy-makers to get a grip and start implementing the type of measures that were ultimately put in place following the last upheaval of this nature; the Gutenberg revolution in the fifteenth century. It took time, but eventually censorship, licensing, copyright and other protections for individual privacy were put in place. We now need to move much faster than in the first information revolution, beginning with an urgent refutation of Mr Zuckerberg’s arrogant assertion that “privacy is no longer a social norm”." John Fanning DRB

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"Whether the first person here is a persona adopted by Phillips, or the empirical Phillips, himself, is a moot point; Phillips’ taut and slightly driven syntax certainly feels personal. And what the poem offers is an exploration of a kind of truth. That Phillips is so successful in persuading the reader that she is reading truths is down to the precision and elegance of that syntax. The reader is taken in at the start of the sentence, the verse paragraph, the whole poem and then let go at the end. To read Carl Phillips is, as has been said by others, to be read by him. Phillips’ querulous, querying syntax seems to inhabit part of the human condition." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"I didn’t realize until recently that you could record on the iPhone, and I suddenly thought, “Maybe I should record all of my day, every day.” Who wouldn’t like to listen to a perfect recording of their own life, as it was 10 years ago?" Hannah Sullivan LARB

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"To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Much contemporary art is irrelevant because it takes no note of this and childishly delights in color." Fred Moten Queen Mob's Teahouse

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"The sorrows of poets are legion, and their failures commonplace. Why does the case of Elizabeth Jennings deserve special consideration?" Dana Gioia • First Things

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"By the time of the Coventry trip, Larkin had abandoned more than one third novel. He was also writing the poems, collected the following year in The Less Deceived, that would make his reputation: “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” “Reasons for Attendance,” “Toads,” “Church-Going,” and of course “I Remember, I Remember.” (The year of Larkin’s trip, the manuscript was rejected by the Dolmen Press in Dublin as “too self pitying” and “too sexy.”)" William Logan New Criterion

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"Not only does our digital living condition us profoundly, and by the stealthiest increments — so that with every new upgrade, every app, we are not only further empowered, but also more deeply reliant — but it also creates in us an estrangement, a sense of void." Sven Birkerts Aeon

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"To some extent the revival can be seen as a vogue among poets, a fashion fuelled by the popularity and visibility of Heaney and Michael Longley, two of its main proponents. In the late 1980s and early 1990s both were instrumental in bringing the classical revival from the Irish stage into poetry." Florence Impens Irish Times

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"Tom French has much to say but admirably it is often on behalf of others. These are poems without any pretensions, with a sturdiness to the diction and playful inclinations such as in the poem “Angler” in which a road-measuring exercise with a reel of tape is compared to the angler reeling in his catch. He mixes plain statement with imaginative and often startling leaps and U-turns that make the reader sit up." Gerard Smyth DRB "The narrative tone of a Tom French poem is immediately recognisable: detached but sympathetic; sensuously nostalgic; watchful; alert to the serendipities of time, place, and logos; acutely aware of the local with its twin taproots in history and landscape." Caitriona O'Reilly Irish Times

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"While a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Hamill won a $500 for producing the best student literary magazine in the country, and used that money to team up with Tree Swenson and Bill O’Daly to found Copper Canyon Press." Ian Dreiblatt Melville House

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"Today I set out to devise the thing I would have actually turned in to W. H. Auden if I had been in his class at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association (better known today as the 92nd Street Y) sixty-two years ago." Anthony Madrid • The Paris Review

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"According to Nadel, the decisive shift toward his future singing career came at a party at Frank Scott’s house, when Cohen introduced the music of Bob Dylan to the Montreal poets. Listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues, the writers didn’t know what to think. Al Purdy, classy as ever, called it an awful bore and stomped out of the room. But “Cohen listened intently, solemnly announcing that he would become the Canadian Dylan, a statement all dismissed.”" Derek Webster • CNQ

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"Flarf was and is many things—a movement, a method, a friend group, an in-joke, an email list. But mostly Flarf was a product of a keenly-felt transitional moment, when the various institutions that glued American poetry together were soaked in the solvent fluids of emergent social media. Poetry, and discourse about it, was no longer beholden to the moderating temporality of the print journal, the gatekeeping of the university MFA program, or the fierce tribalism of the city-based avant-garde scene." Jasper Bernes Chicago Review

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"That Shakespeare did not (as far as we know) plan land-grabs and massacres in Ireland or anywhere else does not alter the fact that his poetical figurations share a lot with Spenser’s. Or may it not in the end be poetry itself which is excoriated as authoritarian, or more commonly “elitist”, or at any rate poetry which values the extending perspectives of its own ancestry and enjoys echoic ornamentation. This would include a lot of contemporary poetry and, I would think, a lot of Irish poetry in both languages." Peter Riley Fortnightly Review

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"Contemporary Anglophone radical poetry absorbs and rejects the imperative to be commensurate with the environment of its making, an imperative made with no greater utopian assiduity than in Whitman’s verse, because the world it must recognize as its own is built upon the systematic exploitation and indentured suffering of those without whom it would not exist." Joe Luna Chicago Review

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"Reticence may be the déformation professionnelle of the poet. In Auden’s case, this seemed all the more likely because much of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out of idioms of everyday language—like “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.” This kind of perfection is very rare; we find it in some of the greatest of Goethe’s poems, and it must exist in most of Pushkin’s works, because their hallmark is that they are untranslatable." Hannah Arendt • Literary Hub

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"This is poetry as “a middle zone between the news and prayer,” as the literary scholar Jahan Ramazani has put it: poetry that comments on the world and at the same time bends language to hope for the possibility of another. Its complexity is sustaining, giving us something to think about that changes as we think about it, and as we hope for conditions to change." David B Hobbs The Nation

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"Digital commentary, Bury writes, can cover the source text like kudzu vines, “until only its faint outline remains”. As with book reviews replacing the book itself, now succeeding waves of commentary can overwhelm the source more rapidly than can be kept up with, which has led to the rise of the “take of takes”: summarised aggregations of the responses so far. It can be oppressive to think about how much of the cultural conversation it is impossible to keep up with." Chris Power New Statesman

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