What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?

I'd like to say that I came across the poet Agha Shahid Ali of my own accord, browsing through the shelves of a bookshop or library and taking immediately to his finely structure...

Sep 8, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Priyanka Motaparthy

The Blue Laws The Blue Laws

My mother, a brunette, hurried in her cloth coat through postwar Sundays, which fell

Sep 4, 2003 / Books & the Arts / William Logan

Walt Whitman Walt Whitman

In 1848, 29-year-old Walt Whitman was for three months a reporter for the Daily Crescent in New Orleans, writing fluff pieces about local color and charm as seen through Yankee...

Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Richard Gambino

Immortality Immortality

There are killer weeds, deep in the flower patch,
down at the bottom of the tombstone.
Only they'll seem to breed out of the ground itself.

Jun 26, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Robert Mazzocco

Passport: A Manifesto Passport: A Manifesto

This is your passport I hold in my hand:
a hemisphere, half red ink, half blue--
as yet untorched by terror, but polluted

Jun 12, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Carol Muske-Dukes

When Poetry Was the Rage When Poetry Was the Rage

"That was a benefit shooting." So said a shaken Kenneth Koch to a stunned audience seconds after a tall, scraggly man fired a pistol at him on January 10, 1968.

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella

She’s So Heavy She’s So Heavy

In 1981 Carolyn Forché published a slim collection of verse, her second, titled The Country Between Us.

May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Meghan O’Rourke

Dead Poets Society Dead Poets Society

It is agonizingly difficult to write about one's hometown as it drowns in flames and suffocates with smoke.

May 8, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Sinan Antoon

Discovery/The Nation ’03 Prizewinners Discovery/The Nation ’03 Prizewinners

The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize of the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y.