"When I was nine years old, I stood onstage in front of the whole school and recited a poem by my mother, Jean Valentine, about the end of her marriage to my father." Rebecca Chace • Yale Review

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"There is no greater tribute for a poet than for a composer to take from his work something for his own purpose. The others can keep their gaudy prizes." Marius Kociejowski PN Review

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"The Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova has aptly called this phenomenon “history as laughing gas,” a process by which those who feel deprived of power find vicarious dignity in the feats of their predecessors. It bears a startling resemblance to recent trends in the United States and Western Europe, where Trump supporters fly Confederate flags and Brexiteers recite Kipling, but its roots in Russia reach back to the fall of the Soviet Union." Sophie Pinkham • Harper's

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"Karen Solie is the freshest poetic voice I’ve encountered in a long while." William Logan • New Criterion

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"To have not only survived thirty-one years, as Sylvia Plath did, but to have filled those years with works of staggering beauty, with poems that irradiate generations of lives — that is a rare triumph of the spirit." Maria Popova • Brainpickings

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"How can cosmopolitan sympathies persist in times of heightened nationalism? The chapter on Isaac Rosenberg and the poetry of World War I shows that a poem like “Break of Day in the Trenches” delicately illuminates the transnational commonalities between soldiers, in defiance of political and national divisions. No-Man’s Land provokes in Rosenberg a desire for the “pleasure / To cross the sleeping green between”. Such a reading will not surprise readers of the poetry of World War I; instead, Ramazani’s achievement is to incorporate such conclusions in a broader approach to poetry." Justin Quinn • Dublin Review of Books

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"Creeley’s Selected Letters are almost uniformly uneventful and dreary." August Kleinzahler • LRB

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"A skinny man who carried a world of books within him, Adam Zagajewski was the kind of person who would offer to drop you off at your hotel after a poetry reading only to pull over midway to better focus on a conversation about poetry. He would email the next day to recommend some more poets he loved, without any of that Bloomian anxiety of influence. None of this was a performance: he was a very shy person, gracious, precise. He believed in the soul—that the soul must live in lyric poetry. That, most of all." Ilya Kaminsky • Yale Review

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"[Zoom] always puts you in a kind of hollow space. After some of these meetings, I feel very hollow in a way, because there’s really no reaction. There’s no interaction. There is no life, onstage action." Durs Grünbein • LitHub

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“I was interrogated. So was he. They said he was at the interrogation centre. But he didn’t come back, only his body.” Chaw Su Guardian

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"Long before the revelations of recent years, his poems and satires dealt with the cruelties in schools and orphanages, abuses of clerical authority, the moral issues of Catholic conscience, the plight of unmarried mothers, priestly celibacy, the bigotries of the devout, and the censorship laws." Gerard Smyth on the 125th centenary of Austin Clarke Irish Times

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'Horrex gathers and shapes her material with a light touch. From the title to the last line, her poem suggests how our concept of the “natural” has itself been eroded. She doesn’t flinch from condemnation. But the poem seems to contain a great deal of sheer pleasure in textures, places, colours, lines." Carol Rumens Guardian

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"Martina Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable. As Bernard O’Donoghue has said, her poems are collectively “a miracle, for the way they combine total clarity with profundity”. Evans is working now with more brio and fearlessness than ever before. American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best." Conor O'Callaghan The Irish Times

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"The question of speech and empire, and what language a colonial subject should use, is a constant subtext in the poems, essays, and fiction of the avant-garde modernist Yi Sang. During his short life, Yi wrote in his native Korean and his received Japanese, while experimenting with, and thus subverting, the rules of both languages. Japanese gave Yi a measure of freedom: He read the French Surrealists and Dadaists in translation and adopted their unsentimental style to process his own dislocation under empire." E. Tammy Kim • The Nation

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"While we hear plenty about what might once have been called his “personal life,” this type of candor belies any great plumbing of more private depths. There are few psychological insights, and only rarely do we see behind the mask of the cheery, light-hearted enjoyer of life. We witness Gunn habitually practicing his own advice. The writer we encounter is, above all, honest, and if what we get is surface rather than self-scrutiny, it’s a seeking, open, generous surface." Declan Ryan Poetry

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"Her essays are counterintuitive, but never contrarian. (“We must run roughshod over what threaten to become memories.”) Ryan isn’t interested in what a Robert Frost poem reveals about his politics, or the economic conditions that shaped Marianne Moore. She has never handled a hot take." Jason Guriel • Literary Hub

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"While it’s hard not to feel sometimes that all we’re doing when we write is sitting in a room talking to ourselves, what a poetry friendship can do, or has done for me at any rate, is connect the practice of the art to its beginnings in a premodern, even pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer, past when agents and publicists did not exist. It has given me a kind of freedom from the expense of spirit in a waste of shame that has accompanied the art’s professionalization —and it has shown me how poetry, even while drenched in a market economy, still has its roots in older, more intimate forms of human belonging." Alan Shapiro Triquarterly

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