"[MSS] only lasted three issues: when [John] Gardner published “The Pedersen Kid” by his part-friend, part-foe [William] Gass, the United States Postal Service threatened a 30-count obscenity lawsuit because of the story. He couldn’t afford it." Nick Ripatrazone * Lit Hub

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"I have become an advocate—I dare say an activist—for the inclusion of non-Anglophone works of 'World Literature' in English translation alongside works of 'Global Anglophone' literature in our seminars and Masters exam lists. Why? Because we cannot teach and administer exams as if Chinua Achebe (a usual suspect) is only in conversation with Joseph Conrad, as if Things Fall Apart has nothing to say to Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (translated from Arabic). Because graduate students reading Rushdie and Roy (more usual suspects) should very well know Intizar Hussain (translated from Urdu) and Kamala Suraya (translated from Malayalam). Because, as Roanne Kantor puts it, 'no coherent historiography of the Global Anglophone can be built within the ‘Anglophone’ itself.'" Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan • b2o

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"The problem with digital-tech metaphors is that what's left out is usually what’s most important. They obscure more than they reveal and generate power by distorting conversations, expectations and understanding of the relationships between technology and humanity." Brett Frischmann • Scientific American

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"I read the archive of male desire and I write an archive of the spit in my mouth, an archive of my mother’s mouth, opening for the spoon, of my daughter’s mouth calling from the bed. I entered 'the academy' pregnant." Julie Carr • Jacket2

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"When I was an undergraduate way back in the ’80s, colleges and universities tended to treat creative writing classes like candy; too many would make you sick and weak." Juliana Spahr • Jacket2

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"Like most superpowers, list-making is a mixed blessing. To put something on a list is also to pull it from its native context, where it makes its fullest sense, and suspend it in a test tube with other displaced things. To list Gladys Knight among the world’s greatest singers is to deprive her of her Pips." Sam Anderson on John Ashbery • New York Times Magazine

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"Autonomy, for [Josué Guébo], is a state of mind that begins with repossessing one’s powers of articulation; first, through mimesis. It culminates in the decision to fight for ever-expanding political freedoms." Virginia Konchan • Boston Review

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"There's a great interview with Claudia Rankine on KCRW's Bookworm where she insists on calling herself a 'poet' even though her book Citizen was nominated for awards in criticism and poetry. So sometimes what a writer calls themselves may have baring on how their work is marketed. I would call Citizen a hybrid book because of how it plays with interview, observation, anecdote, and found footage. It actually might be apt to call it collage. Because there are a multiplicity of approaches to the work in terms of modes of discourse, I would call that a book with hybrid forms." Oliver de la Paz • Ghost Proposal

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"For some poets, the second book is a natural extension of the first, thematically and formally. In other instances, a second book can represent a radical departure. It can help writers feel they have a 'career,' a future, a life as a poet beyond the one-hit wonder of the inaugural book. Whether much anticipated or overlooked by readers and reviewers, second books move beyond the crucible of the first book. They signal movement." Lisa Russ Spaar • Los Angeles Review of Books

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"LANGUAGE poets uncovered some really beneficial weapons to use. The problem is, I think they were more interested in sharpening them than using them, as you hint. To me, their work often becomes esoteric at best and, at worst, grotesquely incestual. I’m thinking specifically of a reading a former LANGUAGE poet extraordinaire gave in Athens last year, in which they read 'white dialect poems.' I was embarrassed to be in the room. It was a perfect example of what I find frustrating at the core of a lot of LANGUAGE poetics and their conceptualist counterparts: a game that turns into self-aggrandizement for the sake of empowering an already too-prolific voice, usually in the name of 'irony.'" Jake Syersak in conversation with James Eidson • Ghost Proposal

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"I wonder how much Smith dwells on how they’ve been received, whether by the black boys and queer communities they speak to and for or by the nation they call out in 'dear white america'–a 2014 recording of that poem, produced by the Minneapolis-based performance-poetry organization Button Poetry, is Smith’s most watched performance, with over three hundred thousand views. In the United Kingdom, for instance, Smith has been framed, alternatively, as instructively representative or startlingly exceptional, as a symptom of the United States’ 'insatiable gun battle with itself' or a 'YouTube star.' Incessantly, tiresomely, readers in both countries have pitted performance poetry (where Smith got their start) against page-bound poetry (where they’re currently thriving). There are, to be sure, plenty of actual differences between performance and the page—plenty to say about technique and embodiment, about demographics and cultural recognition (you are not reading the Yale Review of YouTube Videos)–but all too often those differences are elided in favor of coded evaluations about class, race, gender, and sexuality, or of supposedly self-evident judgments about what could (or could never) deserve to be termed 'poetic,' 'artistic,' 'intellectual.'" Christopher Spaide • Yale Review

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"It should be awarded to a poet of true recognition, a poet admired by both their fellow poets and by the public, a poet who is both expert and enthusiast, and a poet who is an accomplished practitioner of the art as well as its champion and ambassador." Simon Armitage Guardian

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"I hope that the endings of my poems will act as a refresh button, sending the reader back into the loop. But sometimes they don’t." Montreux Rotholtz in conversation with Kallie Falandays • Entropy

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"These poems avoid the kind of mushily Heideggerean ecopoetics that seeks to regain our rootedness within nature by recovering particular lost words for it. There is as much enchantment here in the technical or informative as there is in the conventionally poetic: cross-referencing when a curlew was ‘required in the books’ to migrate is just as much a part of looking for it as the actual sighting. The pleasure that comes with our failed naming of the beasts reaches its zenith in our pets, the animals we know we can’t name into loving us." Jack Belloli Review31

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"Poetry has changed a great deal in the 10 years of her tenure: “We have Instagram poets, performance poetry has exploded, there’s much more diversity.”" Lisa Allardice profiles Carol Ann Duffy Guardian

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"The increasing note of desperation might have been triggered by the fact that Beuscher hardly ever replied. This was something that Sylvia seems to have feared from the start, and explains why she repeatedly proposes “paid-letter sessions” in three letters from July. On September 4, she writes: 'I’d be awfully grateful just to have a postcard from you saying you think any paid letter sessions between us are impractical or unhelpful or whatever . . . . It is the feeling of writing into a void that never answers, or may at any moment answer, that is difficult.' In total, Sylvia sent fourteen letters and seems to have received only two. But the editors do not make the pattern of correspondence easy to reconstruct." Hannah Sullivan • TLS "Plath’s letters to Beuscher, whom she stiffly addresses as 'Dr.' throughout, sometimes assume the tone of a psychiatric appointment, where candor and speculation, fact and hunch, are twinned. But their transparency is arresting; these are the only letters in the book where Plath sets aside the kaleidoscopic genius of her style in favor of the plainest possible account. And it is fully consistent with what has long been suspected about Hughes and Plath’s relationship that he might have assaulted her." Dan Chiasson • New Yorker

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"Indeed, what is often striking about Adrienne Rich’s concept of 'transformative writing,' to borrow Claudia Rankine’s formulation, is its Whitmanian inclusiveness, as well as its use of rhetorical strategies derived from one of her earliest enthusiasms, Wallace Stevens. 'Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself' runs a typical Stevens title, and crucial to Rich’s redemptive vision of poetry is the act of clearing away the mythical accretions, the inherited narratives, that prevent analysis and understanding and liberation." Mark Ford • NYRB

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