A Vivisectional Style
John Donne was a contemporary of Shakespeare. This is strangely difficult to remember, for they had contrary relationships to poetic traditions and trends. Like other English...
The Cruelties of Empire
In the heyday of colonialism decades ago, when the British Empire controlled so much of the world, it was tempting to think of it as more...
Between Abstraction and Representation
In the past quarter-century a great debate that dominated the visual arts for a hundred years has faded, but without a conclusion. On one side were...
Resurrecting the Poets of Tbilisi
John Steinbeck traveled to Soviet Georgia in 1947 and marveled afterward that Georgian poetry was read there “by everyone,” that Georgian poets “were buried on an...
Accounting for the Human Cost
How should the United States be dealing with inflation? For many decades, economists have given a straightforward answer: the Federal Reserve Board should increase interest rates...
Holding a Gun
In the spring of 2017 I met Reginald Dwayne Betts. I began to read his poetry, his memoir of how he became a poet in prison,...
Sithens in a Net
from a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt What we try to snag and hold fastof laughter, wood smoke, but especiallythe necessary ignorance to go forward, to...
The Jewish Authenticity Trap
The Holocaust has long loomed large in the American imagination, but in recent years it has come to seem ubiquitous, with Holocaust-related symbols and slogans infiltrating...
Total Recall
King Rao, the billionaire tech founder at the center of Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, is neither a king nor, strictly speaking, immortal....
