By creating a space to take us outside ourselves, poems cast an almost mystical spell. Two new collections prove the point.

A world without poetry would be a dire thing indeed. From Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night to Shakespeare’s famous love sonnet parody, Sonnet 130, the forms of ...

Poetry in the 21st century is both ubiquitous and oddly peripheral. Verses are displayed on subway walls, recited on momentous occasions, and served up in giant fonts on social media, but rarely do ...

Where are the boundaries between adjacent literary forms? When does prose become poetry, poetry become song, song become theater? These bounds are collapsing as contemporary artists experiment. Though ...

The poet, like countless others precariously employed in higher education, faces yet another broke summer. In Eckes’s poem, two forms sit in direct confrontation. The unemployment form, with its ...