The wish to avoid the difficulties of attempting to reproduce Valéry’s own rhyme and scansion is understandable, but replacing them with another set of procedural impositions doesn’t necessarily allow the translation to do justice to the original.

We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make the world even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation.

Every word of this book is Angel, ἄγγελος, the potently vitaminal vessel through which eternity manifests as dilatory consciousness in this world.

In a new twist on the Anvil and Rose column, Inspector Watt reviews the reviews of Dwight Garner.

Herman Van den Reeck reviews books of poetry by Kerrin Mccadden, Deborah Paredez and Richard Blanco, and anthologies of Affrilachian and Conceptual poetry.

What does it mean to identify with these characters? To find their struggles the same as my own?

Equal parts Star Wars, On the Road, Deleuzean war machine, and surrealist delirium, this poem-ever-in-progress is literature on steroids, philosophy on acid. It is scandalous, funny, erudite, and endlessly generative. It is an epic without organs.

Gay and lesbian artists would be best served by curators and gallery-goers taking their work seriously as art, and rejecting the sexualized promotional copy which today passes for queer aesthetics.

Kelly, I say, has been islanding, becoming island, all sea, breeze, epos now, all crossroads, it bringing the news, that is poetry.

Evan Kennedy’s new book might be called a long prose-poem, but not liking that term, I think it better to say that it is merely (which is to say “purely, nakedly”) a Poem.

Inspector Watt delivers five flash reviews of books of poetry by Lyn Hejinian, Deborah Landau, Sabrina Orah Mark, Melissa Monroe, and Sarah Ruhl.

In this 5th installment of the biweekly Anvil and Rose, Hermann Van den Reeck returns with flash reviews of books by Patrick Greany and Sabine Zelger; Melissa Lozada-Oliva; Nancy Lee; Jessica Q. Stark; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

Martin Eden is the story of an autodidact who, in transcending his social class and achieving artistic success, becomes trapped in both the strictures of the culture industry and the confines of his own rigid ideology.

Fourth installment of Anvil and Rose, the third by Inspector Wyatt.

Far from being a straightforward narrative, Jean Daive’s memoir-cum-poetic-reverie Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan is yet all the more rewarding for its doggedly lucid wandering through recurring vagaries of symbol and motif.

Third installment of Anvil and Rose, the second by Inspector Wyatt.

The works included in Milano Chow’s new show at Bel Ami, “Park La Brea,” conceal themselves from strangers, murmuring discomfort and paranoia under their breath, only audible when confronted with the intention of listening.

Love makes you a stranger to yourself, and the best any of us can hope for is someone good and kind willing to catch you from that existential fall.

Our second installment of Anvil and Rose! Hermann Van den Reeck reviews five books of poetry from Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Don Mee Choi, Natalie Díaz, Tommy Blount, and Eduardo Corral.

Watt on books by Bob Arnold, Jericho Brown, Carolyn Forché, Patricia Colleen Murphy, and Fernando Pessoa.