The Close Reading Series invites our board editors to write about a favorite piece from our Spring 2020 issue. These readings are not intended to be definitive interpretations; when we read, we bring with us our own histories, experiences, and references, all of which guide our relationship to the work before us. It is possible,…
The Close Reading Series invites our board editors to write about a favorite piece from our Spring 2020 issue. These readings are not intended to be definitive interpretations; when we read, we bring with us our own histories, experiences, and references, all of which guide our relationship to the work before us. It is possible,…
AN INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY MORGAN LEVINE Bryn Evans received our Spring 2020 Poetry Prize for her poem “Thotiana’s interlude, or Barbara Mason reconsiders settling down.” Bryn and I called each other from our respective hometowns of Decatur, Georgia and Houston, Texas for this interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity. I’ve been a fan…
Red, all the olive fields were limned with ruddy gold, laden branches sprouting furrows, tangled boughs that carved them- selves in gaps between the morning, havens painted into crossties, stopgap limbs to pave anew the solar path. In patchwork shreds, the silences sat struck, and some- thing spoke that could have been a person …
1. Scattered with nebulous crockery we talk mothers their grief, their limpid yearning. Your father is to my father only quantitatively. His grandmother and her worried son frantic across the rutted old table. Our earnest faith constructs so much glaring, translucent joy. I do describe his shoestring body and lie when I wish his wife…
“Beginning with the fall of towers and ending with the emergence of a new voice, the mastery of Against Translation is clear…”
“Spectres linger in the poems of Ransom Street…”
Growing out of a Fall 2017 project initially submitted for Professor Richard Sacks’ “The English Sonnet” course at Columbia University, Emily Sun’s essay is an analysis of a critical edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet—To Science.” The edition was produced by Sun herself from a number of existing editions of the poem, and is contained…
I don’t remember when poetry came into my life…
John Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many other prizes. This poem was published by the Review over twenty years after he had earned his M.A. from Columbia. Happy Autumn Fields by John Ashbery I call it (though I’m no authority)The big syndrome, of when everythingLies down together. The pointed roofsThat called…