When I was a soccer-obsessed fifteen-year-old, I had no use for poetry. I endured my school hours like a crated dog, waiting to get out on the field. One afternoon in the library, I picked up a random book of English verse and flipped through it. Eventually I landed on a song from Charles Kingsley’s…

Winter is coming. All of northern Michigan seems to whisper the warning. The sun is slower to rise each day, and the mist clings to the lakes when I drive my children to school in the darkness. Our neighbors have been anticipating the first snowfall since we arrived here in August, when it was ninety-two…

The first time I encountered Guns N’ Roses, it was a flag hanging on the bedroom wall of a kid I barely knew. You’ve likely seen the image—a cross, adorned with representative skulls for each member of the band. I hadn’t heard Appetite for Destruction at that point, but I knew this was something to…

It refused to rain during the hot, middling July weeks the summer I turned fifteen. The clouds hung low over the Plains. My mother and I fought nearly every day during that dry month, even if our fighting was mostly silent, threats drawn from taut eyes and skin. I pushed always, every day, against an…

Where do our words come from? And our lives: how do they connect with those (whether persons or words) now dead but perhaps living on—in ways we can almost touch, almost speak? These are the complex questions that Margaret Gibson raises and wraps her own language around in this remarkable poem. For all their complexity,…

There’s a sub-genre of poetry in which the speaker’s persona is a long-ago figure or a fictional character. Here, in “Translation Back into Native Tongues,” the speaker is John of Patmos, purported author of the biblical Book of Revelation. His subject in this poem is language, languages: always a perfect subject for poetry, that prime…

Joan Didion’s family, she says, are a tribe of leavers. In her 2004 book Where I Was From, she begins with her great-great-great-great-grandmother and traces a family history lined with people who, she says, are always leaving, always pushing west. “They tended to accommodate any means in pursuit of an uncertain end,” she says, unsparingly.…