I Am Ready To Be Every Animal You Leave Behind
“Vuong shows the world for the truth of all its sharp and beautiful teeth.” —a visual essay Tessa Hulls
All posts filed under: Essays
Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
A THOUSAND IMAGINATIONS: What the Books of Alberto Ríos Say to Each Other
“Perhaps conversations among Ríos’ works are most evident in the ones about the border, where the elbow taps of solidarity acknowledge the tenuous ground upon which an idea that becomes a fence that becomes a wall is built.”—an essay by Donna Miscolta
Getting Out of the Way: The Quiet Poem
“By simplifying language, diction, detail, a poem can transcend the ‘lean moment’ and brush up against an intimate and unshakable truth.”—an essay by D.S. Waldman
A Book in a Tree Is a Love Poem and Also Not a Love Poem
“A watershed of shared thinking.”—Youth Responses to Natalie Diaz curated by Laura Da’
The Music of the Zone
“The Zone of Stalker becomes shorthand for us to talk about the forbidden spots of a poem.” -John Wall Barger
Through Armantrout’s Looking Glass: The Poem as Wonderland
“I learned that poems may be deliberate and arbitrary at the same time.”—an essay by Julie Marie Wade
Going in Fear of Negation: What Happens When We Stop Saying ‘No’?
An essay by Justin Jannise
A Triptych on Toi Derricotte
“The poem will tell us the depths to which we will need to go.”—an essay by Bettina Judd
The Territory Is Also the Map
an essay by Weston Morrow
Still Loving the World
The “We” Behind the “I” in “Good Bones”—an essay by Kathleen Flenniken