The “Best of…” anything carries with it the burden of expectation. That which claims to be above the rest is ultimately a matter of taste. Therefore, picking up and reading this collection of personal essays is somewhat similar to... Read More

“Nowhere else are the esoteric practices of Tibet’s Tantric tradition so boldly illustrated, and nowhere else has Tibetan art achieved such an extraordinary synthesis of creativity and philosophical depth,” writes the author,... Read More

“I know that when the storm of Lenin and Stalin came / to outrage itself, poet masses left and Akhmatova / alone remained,” writes Braggs in the title poem of his latest collection. He is in the house where the great Russian poet... Read More

“Through yoga it is said that one may gradually be united with something higher, more subtle, more universal, and more profound than we find in everyday consciousness—the pure nature of self.” The authors of this user-friendly... Read More

The best poems are the ones that call a reader to return again, conveying content through imagery, then going further, by penetrating these images in an act of transcendence. Representative of this process are the following lines about... Read More

“Man, society, and the nation cannot fully exist without an attempt at self-understanding,” writes Kirill Kovaldzhi in an essay describing the state of poetry in Russia at the end of the 1990s, a time when poetry returned to its... Read More

“…climb the wall, you will see quite a sight. / (though a bullet might strike your inquisitive eye as you gape.).” Written in 1984 while Ratushinskaya was in a Soviet prison camp serving a four-year sentence, these lines refer to... Read More

Undeniably composed with the ear in mind, Manesiotis offers highly aestheticized poems that beg to be felt deeply, as she feels them, in the bone. Traversing themes of love and loss, the Greek homeland of her ancestors, religious ritual... Read More