Tracy K. Smith, the United States poet laureate, looks at the ways poetry has dealt with the shifting political landscapes of the past two decades.
The author, most recently, of the poetry collection “Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart” feels a duty to read about countries devastated by war: “The suffering, usually for the most vulnerable, never ends.”
“Selected Poems: 1950-2012,” and “Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry,” are laden with insights that, six years after Rich’s death, remain as urgent as ever.
The Book Review’s poetry columnist, David Orr, picks 10 collections worth your attention.
The editors of The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year.
The Book Review’s poetry editor, Gregory Cowles, discusses Tracy K. Smith’s essay about political poetry and more from this week’s special issue.
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
In “A Cruelty Special to Our Species,” Emily Jungmin Yoon memorializes the Korean “comfort women” who were forced into prostitution during World War II.
In Anne Waldman’s latest collection, “Trickster Feminism,” her verses argue on behalf of collective expression — and collective responsibility.
In “Evolution,” Eileen Myles makes us reconsider the nature of experience and imagination.
Terrance Hayes’s hybrid nonfiction book “To Float in the Space Between” pays homage to the poet Etheridge Knight, with room for personal detours and meditation.
The former first lady’s long-awaited new memoir recounts with insight, candor and wit her family’s trajectory from the Jim Crow South to Chicago’s South Side and her own improbable journey from there to the White House.
Book titles can’t be copyrighted, and that led to a recent dust-up on social media.
An unpublished trove of photographs and letters the author kept while serving in the U.S. Army in Dresden provides the biographical context for his most influential novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
A snowplow who works all night long, a naughty kid who breaks his mom’s favorite ornament, a fox hunting for a winter meal, and more in the season’s standout picture books.
Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
Ma Jian, one of the sharper observers of contemporary China, though living in exile for 30 years, says this era resembles that of the Cultural Revolution.
In these four deeply political, deeply personal books, poets grapple with some hot-button issues of the day.
In poems that cajole, beguile, praise and evoke, Robert Bly makes the case that poetry should be near the center of life.
“The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht,” translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, brings together more than 1,000 poems.
J. Michael Martinez’s “Museum of the Americas” takes on the white gaze, colonial trauma and Mexican migration.
Marcus Jackson’s collection “Pardon My Heart” celebrates the way deep emotion unfogs and energizes the experience of living.
In which we consult the Book Review’s past to shed light on the books of the present. This week: Margaret Atwood on Adrienne Rich.
“Be With,” by Forrest Gander, plumbs death and grief with an alertness to the fragility of life — and of language.
Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
