Karen Weiser’s first book of poetry, To Light Out, turns on a cosmic conceit. In 1964, two scientists realized that the static they heard on their radio device was the sound of the Big Bang. They were, in effect, listening to the origin of the universe. Weiser riffs on this in her introduction:
When I became ...

For almost 25 years now, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been working on what she predicts will be a six-volume poem titled Drafts. By my count, Pitch, which was just published, is number 4, and it weighs in at 180 pages. Drafts is already a big poem, considerable in every way.
The 20th century solved the problem ...

Michael Heller has long been a poet of ambitious speculation and intellectual yearning. He labors in the shadow of a god he doesn’t adhere to, living on words that are echoes, “between hope and horror, between sacred sound/and profane air.”  He is, by his own admission, both secular and a heretic and like any good ...

Ilya Kaminsky and Matvei Yankelevich are not the only Russian-born Jewish poets in the United States these days, but they might be the best known. They couldn’t approach their aggregation of hyphens—Russian-Jewish-American—more differently. Kaminsky writes as an exile, Yankelevich as an immigrant.
Kaminsky, whose award-winning first book, Dancing in Odessa, was published when he was 27, ...

As his The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems shows, the award-winning poet Edward Hirsch is traditional in a recognizably American way. He likes established verse forms (the book contains a lot of sonnets and a surprising number of sestinas) without making a big deal of them. He wears his considerable erudition lightly. His poems ...

The poet Charles Bernstein often writes badly but rarely writes poorly. I mean this as a compliment.
Bernstein is a master of his effects and as such, writes well, but he has spent more than three decades breaking the decorum of “good” poetry. He’s cracked wise, shattered syntax, and played havoc with grammar. Bernstein has gotten ...

In Who Was Jacques Derrida?, David Mikics provides a lucid, polemical intellectual biography of the French philosopher. He is also settling accounts. In the 1970s and 1980s, Derrida, who died six years ago at 73, was the most important and most polarizing figure in the humanities in America. His brand of thought, deconstruction, ...

In Rejoicing: New and Collected Poems, Stanley Moss’s recently published collection, Moss quotes Baudelaire’s sly aphorism: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.” For more than 40 years, Moss has been addressing that sole being without worrying whether He exists or not.
The 84-year-old poet (who is also ...

In Scribe, his seventh book of poetry, published this fall, Norman Finkelstein (the poet, not the Israel critic) works the contradictions of being a Jew. He is simultaneously secular and religious, stately and conversational, prophetic, and circumspect.
To begin with: Finkelstein is keenly aware of the theological implications of Judaism. In a article in the academic ...

We’re taught that poetry is supposed to be hard, but it really isn’t. High school teachers and college professors and lots of other people still talk about poems as if they were full of “symbols,” arcane “references,” and “hidden meanings.” Thick with metaphor and lousy with similes, poetry is presented as buried treasure without a ...