I Shall Be Released 
Kevin Young
What we love will leave us or is it we leave what we love, I forget— Today, belly full enough to walk the block after all week too cold outside to smile— I think of you, warm in your underground…
Ivan & Imelda
G. K. Wuori
What he did then, this Ivan Carmody—a tall man, though bellied out to a good two-hundred, sixty pounds—he jerked open the passenger door of the car, got in, and said to the woman: “Get out of this car. I’m taking…
Hikmet
Christian Ward
i.m Nazim Hikmet A little unknown folktale is that Nazim Hikmet could tune into radio transmissions using the power of his heart alone. Guards at Bursa Prison noticed he used to stroke his breast and a loud transmission would start…
Back to the Future: The Continuing Appeal of The Education of Henry Adams
John Orr
In 1907, as Henry Adams began passing around copies of The Education of Henry Adams to a select group of friends and associates, the United States was in the early stages of its imperium. It had recently fought its first…
Organic Formalism and John Witte’s The Hurtling
Scott Knickerbocker
Artifice, whether artistic or technological, comes naturally to humans; moreover, artifice is what paradoxically connects us to the rest of nature. Thus, poetic language, although distinct from nature, nevertheless has an analogous relationship to it; both language and nature occupy…
One Bright Case of Idiopathic Cranofacial Erythema
Colleen Kinder
I blamed the malady on my Irish side: the relatives who stared out from baby pictures like porcelain dolls. My mom’s parents were immigrants, effortfully proper in that just-hoping-to-blend-in-and-prosper kind of way, not to mention Catholic. Severely Catholic. When I…
Review of Brian Hall’s Fall of Frost: A Novel
Mark Kemp
Viking, $24.99 (hardcover) Elegant prose in fiction always grips me, but only occasionally does a novel come along whose language holds me spellbound, makes me forget the tyranny of plot. Fall of Frost defies fast reading and so probably won’t…
Review of Richard Kenney’s The One Strand River
Jessica Johnson
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95 (hardcover) It is difficult to draw a bead on this thick, varied collection, especially since Kenney’s last two books, Orrery and Invention of the Zero, were clearly concept albums. Fortunately, this beast knows itself and leaves…
Review of Peter Stanlis’s Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher
Robert Bernard Hass
ISI Books, $28.00 (hardcover) On Robert Frost’s 85th birthday, Henry Holt and Company, Frost’s lifelong publisher, threw a party in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and invited the eminent critic Lionel Trilling to deliver the keynote address. Widely regarded at…
Actual Cost
Steve Harper
[Manhattan. Saturday. An almost empty subway car. IYANA, black, and B.T., white, both late twenties, sit next to each other. His arm is around her. Both are dressed nicely in business attire. She looks incredible. He looks uncomfortable in…
A Note on the Misuse of Adverbs
Brian Doyle
One time my brothers and I were sitting at a balcony table in an ancient pub in New York City, conducting scholarly research, when my brother Thomas overheard a conversation below us and embarked on a memorable adventure that I…
Existentialism and Homosexuality in Gunn’s Early Poetry
Alfred Corn
In the early 1950s, when Thom Gunn began publishing, the reigning ideology among artists who subscribed neither to religion nor Communist politics was Existentialist philosophy. The thinker most often cited as a model was Sartre; and then, because of her…
Review of Daniel Hall’s Under Sleep
Janet Chalmers
University Of Chicago Press, $22.00 (hardcover) If you want to fall in love with James Merrill (again) be sure to look up his charming age-bowing-to-youth introduction to Amherst-in-residence poet, Daniel Hall’s first book, Hermit In Landscape (1990) which he chose…
