"If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself."Christian Wiman • Image Journal

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"The years have passed and I cannot help it. There is mourning for the time that was lost, for the things that have happened and will not happen again. It’s a death. If you gave me a time extension, I would have very nice things to tell you." Kiki Dimoula • The National Herald

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"One evening, instead of coming inside when called, I climbed the fig tree, wearing only a tee shirt and underpants. It seemed like a game, to be up in the tree, and my parents not able to find me, calling my name as they wandered the yard. And then somehow, I fell, and then suddenly stopped falling: my underwear had caught on a branch, saving me from hitting the ground, but holding me in midair, unable to get down. The way I remember it, my mother told my father to get a ladder." Carl Phillips • Emergence Magazine

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"After the death of R. F. Langley, Prynne once talked to me about the presence of song within the course of a life. He asked a surprising question: Where do all the songs a person knows and carries go when that person dies? The answer might come readily to the materialist. But since those songs and tunes never wholly belong to the human organism, it’s worth considering that they are released back into the still vibrating world, transformed into some other substance." Luke Roberts The Chicago Review (scroll down)

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"There’s something to that experimental mode, where the “I” is almost discouraged, and you don’t have to dig in and face your vulnerabilities. It’s also very gendered, so masculine. Any vulnerability is considered weak." Cathy Park Hong • Bomb Magazine

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"I am reading The Alexiad (in E.R.A. Sewter’s translation). Anna Komnene is the most human of historians. That is, when she allows her necessary guard to fall, the human rushes in." Evan Jones • The Carcanet Blog

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"Arthur’s project, I would suggest, is to push the world of the poem and the world of the reader into a recognition of the kind of truth of which poetry is particularly capable. This is a truth which can be very uncomfortable but also sustaining." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"Brathwaite’s concentration on the African elements of Caribbean poetry and history differentiated him from other major Caribbean writers such as VS Naipaul, who focused on Indians who had been transplanted to the New World, and Derek Walcott, who claimed English literature (including the iambic pentameter) as equally part of his heritage." Lyn Innes Guardian

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"But wait! This is a passage about someone trying to find a highly crafted, intellectual solution to an essentially emotional problem. And don’t we all know the dread, desperate feeling: you’re losing someone, and wishing there was something – anything – you could do to avoid the loss? And trying to logic up a solution to your hurt, and knowing you’ll fail?" Joey Connolly • Poetry London

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"Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo in Royal Park (the Park gives the book the title of one of its poems), into that of charismatic megapoems." Michael Farrell • Sydney Review of Books

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"One of his friends from his Istanbul years sent me a number of the poems he read at the poetry group with which he associated there. It consisted of young, established and striving writers, and visiting writers were welcome. This poem, his ‘All-purpose Elegy’, can stand as a wry selfie by the man who never mastered the camera phone, and as a taster for the poems that will follow in this and other journals, and in the Collected." Michael Schmidt on John Ash PN Review

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"You can, if you try, read [Samuel] Menashe as a poet of careful, distant, loyal companionship." Stephanie Burt • Commonweal

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"Our age lacks literary coherence and nowhere is this more apparent than in translation." Michael Schmidt • Literary Review

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"WH Auden may not have foreseen this report’s particular use of statistics when he wrote his commencement address for graduating Harvard students, Under Which Lyre, a poem which poked fun at quantity-measuring approaches to art, and life: “Thou shalt not sit / With statisticians nor commit / A social science”." Martin Doyle The Irish Times

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