More on: Poetry

When we first read Molly McCully Brown’s essay, “Bent Body, Lamb” (which would become our most-read essay of 2016), we were immediately drawn in by the poignancy and starkness of the opening scene: a mother and young teen daughter lie in the dark heat of a Virginia summer night, together enduring the physical torment of…

Austin Segrest’s poems are small miracles of compression. In the space of fourteen or so highly polished lines, in language that is by turns highly metaphorical and earthy, he creates fully realized sonic and psycho-spiritual worlds. His two recent poems in Image both inhabit the world of his Puritan forbears, a subject he returns to.…

Through her poems, Kathleen Wakefield looks at the world with great tenderness. We like to think that her poems see people and things the way God sees them, with the eyes of patience and affection. In simple, elegant lines, Wakefield discovers surprising and fresh aspects of familiar things. Her language is beautiful in its understatement,…

In the hands of poet Valerie Wohlfeld, a traditional form like the sonnet is less a constraint than a provocation. To see her execute fourteen loosely iambic lines is to watch someone frolic on the playground of English sound—she delights in internal rhyme, alliteration, and the rhumba of stressed and unstressed syllables. And though she…

Todd Davis is a poet with an instinct for thin places—the places where heaven and earth lie close together and are able to communicate with each other, where the sacred is present in the ordinary, where mystery reveals itself. In his patient attentiveness to the natural world, to dreams, and to memory, he seeks out…

Since his first poetry collection, Rose, was published in 1986, Li-Young Lee has produced an acclaimed body of work that is equally lyrical, personal, and spiritual. Much of his work reflects the dance between the powerful influence of his father, a Taoist convert to Christianity who became a minister, and his own, more mystical expression…

Bronwen Butter Newcott’s vivid poems make the landscape of southern California a parable for a relentless spiritual seeking. That urban and suburban desert makes a weirdly off-kilter analogy to the holy land—a paved garden of magnolia and honeysuckle scoured by dry winds, a man-made oasis in an arid zone, which becomes an arena for meeting…

In her elegant, approachable poems, Katharine Coles addresses subjects as diverse as the geology of Antarctica, eating dinner, mathematics, the decomposition of corpses, and biblical stories of creation and annunciation. Her language is graceful and precise, with nothing extra and without undue compression, streamlined as a beautiful sports car. It conveys rigor without stiffness, intellect…

Harp is a poet of dreams, but a thoroughly grounded one. His poems invite us into surreal territory, but they do so companionably, hospitably. In Harp’s hands, dream imagery turns surprisingly solid; he defamiliarizes without self-conscious or discombobulating weirdness. The poems are rich with lines you want to reread and savor. Some moments feel stately…

Most contemporary poetry approaches the language of the Bible obliquely or allusively, if at all. The fear, perhaps, is that the words of scripture are too familiar, that too much has been said about them already. Or perhaps they seem too foreign, too distant in time, geography, and culture, for us to engage with them…