Condemned to a vertiginous existence of eternal youth and eternal isolation, Edmund poignantly sums up The Poet’s plight in an imaginary conversation with Happy Hour, his ghoulish bartender: “We’re gone / Happy Hour, we’re gone. Why so we are, Edmund, we’re the goingest of men.” Continue reading Microreview: Glyn Maxwell, Time’s Fool and The Boys at Twilight (2001)

There’s a deep and dark humor to nearly every poem, the deadpan gallows humor of a true ironist caught in the midst of failed reconciliations: “Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all,” she writes knowingly, sympathetically. “But we understand it as something very, very large.” Continue reading Microeview: Sarah Manguso, The Captain Lands in Paradise (2003)

The same sweet-natured, wounded speaking voice navigates the (mostly) short poems here—poems reliant on quiet dislocations and narrative misdirection for effect. Continue reading Microreview: Matthew Rohrer, Satellite (2002)

These points of connection are a kind of grace, and it is the poet’s wonderful intelligence that makes them possible. Continue reading Microreview: Heather McHugh, Eyeshot (2004)

Elegy for a Broken Body makes clear that it’s not innovation but attention that counts: “even the silence, / if you listened, / meant something.” Continue reading Microreview: Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine (2016)

With Marvelous Things, Mlinko makes a strong argument for the lyric’s author-reader relationship as a singularly rich staging ground for the wonder of human cognition. Continue reading Microreview: Ange Mlinko, Marvelous Things Overheard (2014)