There is a glut of books published on all aspects of film studies: critical analyses of directors’ oeuvres; in-depth explications of classic and contemporary films; film genre readers; and histories of cinema in scores of countries and... Read More

The “Robinson” in the title of Kathleen Rooney’s new collection of poems refers to a persona that appears in four poems by Weldon Kees. The “Robinson” poems, as they have come to be known, are widely regarded as being among... Read More

The sheer number of lists that are featured in popular magazines and websites speaks to a cultural fascination with the enumeration (and often, qualification) of all sorts of things—twenty ways to balance your budget, the top ten... Read More

Too often, when contemporary poets employ humor, they do so at the expense of their art. The potential for sublimity and poetic revelation in language seems to be diminished by its inclusion. The poems end up feeling cheapened or even... Read More

Robert Duncan, we learn in the first few pages, was adopted by a theosophist couple who happened to be looking for a boy born at precisely the date and time that he was born. His birth mother, Marguerite, died hours after Robert was... Read More

Fires that start in harvested and packaged modules of cotton behave quite differently than the fires that consume other types of crops; it takes the slightest ember from a cigarette butt that isn’t entirely stamped out to light a... Read More