The name of Ahmad Shamlu (1925—2000), widely recognized as one of the major Iranian poets of the twentieth century, will be new to most American readers. A prolific writer and translator who helped to introduce many world authors to... Read More

Of the many risks that poets may choose, this one opts—unusually—for quietness. These poems speak in an understated, direct voice, with few verbal flourishes or tricks with language. “Gray,” for example, begins with the prosaic... Read More

Surrealism began almost a century ago as very much a man’s movement, but poets like Brenda Shaughnessy have recently adapted many surrealist techniques for purposes that are distinctly womanly and all their own. "Human Dark with Sugar"... Read More

The mostly brief prose poems that make up Jennifer Moxley’s fourth book of poetry locate themselves immediately in what must now, oddly, be described as the experimental tradition. The epigraph (untranslated) is from Rimbaud’s... Read More

What poetic form has proven more resilient and adaptable than the sonnet? The author’s fourth book—and second collection of sonnets—demonstrates that much remains to be done within the familiar confines of fourteen lines of iambic... Read More

These poems offer an everyday world made strange by yearning, attention, and what is either a delightfully whimsical invention or some curious acquaintances. Is his endodontist really a “sly Buddha / teaching the noble truth of... Read More

Reading this book is like listening to a veteran blues player—B.B. King, say—one so sure of his craft that he seems totally unconcerned about showing it off. Casual as they seem, the author’s poems generate unexpected intensities... Read More

In Zurich in 1915 began the original Dada movement, a no-holds-barred assault on the conventional rationality, morality, and religion that had somehow plunged the world into war. Short-lived as it was, Dada’s edgy, sometimes playful... Read More