"A poem’s politics can’t be neatly deduced from its formal surface, or a poet’s politics from her chosen verse style. Claims to the contrary stem from many sources, some of them vital to the history of the art; but they are rooted, ultimately, in an American fixation on branding, packaging, and labels. The politicization of the “free” in “free verse” deserves scrutiny as an American marketing ploy: a cliché of the “free market” in the “land of the free.” The contrasting term “formalism,” applied to metrical poetry whether the poet likes it or not, deserves scrutiny as a misleading label: a term almost perfectly contrived to sound staid (“formal”) and ideological (“ism”)." Austin Allen LARB

---

"The Duino Elegies has ten poems in it. Geography III is 64 pages long. I’m not so worried about disappearing that I feel I need to publish a book every two years. I also write lots of things–just not poetry–and I write every day. Each of my books of poems has been written within a certain context, within a fairly tightly defined period of time, and they reflect a certain way of thinking and art-making. When I write poems, it has to be driven by some urgency–existential, spiritual, psychological–and not just out of some sense of wanting to see my name in print." Mark Wunderlich • Tupelo Quarterly

---

"This is a child’s fantasy of connection. What, then, is the writer’s? As [Victoria] Chang understands it, her family sacrificed “to build a better life, without the incisions of the past.” Her own project is not to erase those incisions—or even, as a child might hope, to heal them—but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." Kamran Javadizadeh • New Yorker

---

"As impossible as it is for translation to capture all aspects of any poem, a version of Purgatorio must convey some of this mood or atmosphere. That should be doable in any language, though one would never know it by reading the American poet Mary Jo Bang’s version of Purgatorio, which is the sequel to her similar Inferno translation of a few years back." Andrew Frisardi • Plough

---

"You can love Whitman’s irrepressible arias while acknowledging his limits as a poet representative of humanity. As the Earth says in his poem “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All”: “let not an atom be lost.” Carry it all, as the earth carries and absorbs the dead. Set none of Whitman down." Han Vanderhart • The Rumpus

---

"Like a lot of contemporary poetry, [Kaveh] Akbar’s work seems written to be performed by Method actors. " William Logan • Tourniquet Review

---