By the light of Psalm 151, we ask, what poet, writing now, is so ready for catastrophe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis? What living poet can so masterfully take up the Lurianic myth of the Breaking of the Vessels, do justice to its imaginative drama, fathom its complexities with an acute historical and critical awareness, yet sing this tale in a way that is both true to our secular moment, and true to the spiritual agonies at the heart of any such shattering as the tale tells.

Maybe now finally ink begins to flow into the nib of this Platignum calligraphy fountain pen I have not used probably since 1985. Yes maybe now finally. Maybe now. Maybe finally.

Excerpt from Jean Paul Richter’s 1797 novel Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces introduced by Brandon Bien.

I am stupid, I am ungifted, I am awkward, but I pray to you, tall spruces. I am quite awkward, I am… a coward. Yesterday, I was frightened of a man I don't respect. It's because of my cowardice that I can't learn to ride a bicycle. I haven't enough will power for anything, but I pray to you, tall spruces.

“I decided early that poetry is made of exact details.” Ultimately, in his poetry, [Flora’s] details are raised far beyond prosaic, everyday specification, simple catalogues of what make up, to use the title of one of his early books, The Physical World (1977).

I want to follow the paths of the stars, I tell myself. But this is not true. I want them to follow me. After all, the Earth is the center of the universe, and, as I am the center of the Earth, the universe revolves around me.

Three poems by Rainer J. Hanshe.

It was just like the cartoons: two hands and a boot kicking the man out the door and headlong across the sidewalk into the gutter, where he landed with a sickening thud.

Excerpt from Fleur Jaeggy’s novel, The Water Statues, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff & introduced by Caitlin Woolsey, with artwork by Ilona Szwarc.

Two men on opposite end of screen faced each other in hieroglyphic pose; fists and elbows raised swaying in geometries as yet to me unschooled.

Eight poems from Matvei Yankelevich’s cycle From a Winter Notebook, accompanied by Hannah Whitaker’s photographs.

The act of writing, as Mancinelli conceives of it, takes her into her darkroom, a “place of the unknown, where [her] demons nestle [and her] most tenacious and impenetrable shadows [can be found].”

Deliver what? Deliver truth? Deliver us? For a poet engaged in composing “the secular word,” there is something disturbingly messianic about Heller’s vision.

Selections from Intact (2018) by Claudia Masin, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers.

Today I begin in earnest. What does it matter that my thoughts are clouded? A light will shine through in the end.

“Imagine an encounter that goes unreported by language.”

I loved Kent's ability to use the poetic art form to criticize not poetry itself, but the popular trends that muddy and obscure poetry by forcing all of us to dig through the garbage to find actual substance.

“From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” doesn’t aspire to the brevity and concision of classical Chinese poetry. They’re relatively long, jumping between themes and styles, and always very funny.

Not since Ed Dorn have we had such scathing satire on the state of the arts, and not since Alexander Pope, I don’t think, have we had someone willing to take on the establishment with such vigor — and in rhymed couplets, yet!