Ideas and actions wear their significance like a brightly colored shirt. With too much repetition, the color fades. Ideas become cliché. Actions become mechanical, rehearsed: playacting. Kay Ryan’s poem by that name begins with a short excerpt of prose from W.G. Sebald’s Campo Santo, which explains that participants in tribal rituals of initiation or sacrifice…
I love poetry, but sometimes it frustrates me in the way it inevitably falls short, language unable to measure up to reality. Good poetry is a good approximation of the real world, but it’s still an approximation. Ada Limón’s “The End of Poetry” rejects that approximation — or, at least, it approximates a rejection (how…
Patrick Phillips is the author of three collections of poetry and a work of nonfiction. His 2004 collection, Chattahoochee, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his 2015 collection, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Phillips earned his PhD in English Renaissance…
Lucia Perillo’s “Samara” is a celebration of small and simple beauty. Perillo died at 58 in 2016, shortly after this poem appeared in the 2012 edition of The Best American Poetry. She died from complications of multiple sclerosis, a disease which inspired much of her poetry. Perhaps the awareness that her life might soon come…
I can’t decide if Eduardo C. Corral’s “To the Angelbeast” is about beauty, or about death, or both.The first time I read the poem, I thought it was beautiful. I could imagine the orchard with the grass unmown, two people there together but apart. One would lie in the grass and throw the dirt: “doe…
I’m sixteen, I have been for a little while now, but I still don’t have my license. I haven’t been so eager to get it because a car feels like something beyond my control. I know that even when I’m sitting in the driver’s seat it will hurtle on without me. In Steve Scafidi’s…