Langdon Hammer's biography of poet and writer James Merrill is "wholly definitive" in scope, and threaded throughout with Merrill’s brilliant, always enlivening wit.
Many modern American thinkers have asked, often and with anxiety, "What is man?" In his latest book, Mark Greif thinks we've outgrown this—and it's a good thing.
Mailer, Trilling, Macdonald, Kazin, Maxwell, Bellow, Auden, O'Hara—men with public moral concerns, who seized power to shape American literature. But who were they?
Baxter reads fiction to “see bad stuff happening.” He writes characters who get into serious trouble, and face their own "human wreckage" at someone else's request.
...in the name of the washed-up, / the lapsed and forgotten, / remnants joined to give loss, // no matter how touch / or random, another shot / at consequence...
"...the part already passed, the part / around the corner, the part that / wrenched the mind from its spiny cave, / the part that sheltered in the flesh..."
So isn’t it shameful that we, still unknowing, will answer with dynamite? / Monkish distraction: this quick digging the pits beneath the enormous / bearded flank,...
I, too, see God adumbrations, I, too, write / a book on love. Who, here, appears, to touch the skin. / Hundreds of thousands of square miles of lost...
The mowers are at work on the hillside, / cutting brush with string trimmers and chattering saws, / and a haze of dust rises up around/ the crew as they labor...
Two new collections of poetry from Geoffrey G. O'Brien and Spencer Reece both resist the "open-ended and often sloppy free-verse form of much contemporary poetry."
