Are we alone? If so, "Particle and Wave" insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elements – a system familiar to many of us from high school chemistry – unfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, perso...

Surrender to a wild river and unexpected things can happen. Time on the water can produce moments of pristine clarity or hatch wild thoughts, foster a deep connection with the real world or summon the spiritual".River of Light: A Conversation with Ka...

From the moment of our first steps, our lives revolve around finding our way through the world. The paths we choose and the guides we trust can forever change our course. Mariner Holly J. Hughes has spent much of her life on the open sea, experiencin...

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system – "suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse", in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in "Poetry and Its Others", Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemp...

In "El Dorado", Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and...

The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all".The Accounts" narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem at...

While living in exile with his family on the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, Victor Hugo wrote some of his greatest poetry and prose, including "Les Miserables" and two epic poems: "Dieu" and "La Fin de Satan".Dieu" pictures the imaginary...

"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing – even lurid – hallucination. From the "Baltimore Catechism" to the great noir films of t...

When Harriet Monroe founded "Poetry" magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door".May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!" For a century, the most important and endurin...

In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries – both dire and hilarious – from the perpetual dissolving of our past to...