I tend to prefer poetry when it holds its head up, taking in the world and responding, alert to beauty and change and able to talk about it in a more or less recognizably adult way. Since almost everything in the universe conspires against these…

It’s refreshing to read a book of poems where the author cares about getting the reader from the beginning to the end, from the first page to the last. It’s surprising, reading this rare kind of book, to come across poem after poem that works…

Beyond the unfamiliar word and the statistically-improbable phrase, sonorous line and shapely stanza, endearing argument, compelling personality and all the other ideology-soggy but nevertheless real markers of competence, there is another order of pleasures of poetry: Taking stock of the writer’s project, how they understand…

You can read David Lawrence’s Lane Changes through in half an hour, starting with the remarkable content of the flat first lines, “I remember getting hit so hard in the head / That the gray canvas turned into / An albino snowstorm,” or instead working…

The movies that illustrate the great soundtracks — Fame, Footloose, Flashdance, Car Wash — put the audience’s feelings on a slow forward-moving track, get them wet, soap them up, hose the undercarriage, and blow hot air on them. No offense to anyone who’s seen them…

People of the book once lived in New York. There was, in the words of Bernard Black, a whole revolting cycle of buying books and reading them and selling them and buying again; apartments with foyers, entryways, livingrooms, linenclosets, bedrooms, the kitchen even the bathroom…

I don’t ask a lot from fiction — just make every word in every sentence count. And please no fuss about backstory, at least no more than what’s going on in the front of the store. Susan Barnes’s debut goes 18 pages — more than…

It’s off the mark to refer to any branch of American poetry as surreal. If you know where in the 811 to look there’s tons of anti-rational, drug-using, sex-narrating, language-deranging literature to be had. Dreams are big business in poetryland. They turn up in every…

Victor Hernandez Cruz’s work is marked throughout by brilliant perception and phrasings, often bordering on the visionary. There are more and more poets capable of pleasing combinations like “perpendicular reptiles” but how many who notice a musician carrying a “load of viands / Toward civilization”?…

Whatever else you’re reading, whatever you’re doing besides looking at this review — stop. Stop and find Jeffrey Harrison’s new book, and read the second half, paying special attention (not that you’ll need to be told) to the sequence titled “An Undertaking.” It is eight…