Writing

Commentary |January 6, 2026

on The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue & Matthew Hollis

reviewed by Christian Detisch

“From the first, his poems dug down into memory to find their source. Or, more precisely, the excavation of memory — both personal and cultural, and the continuity he sought in it — is his subject.”
Commentary |January 6, 2026

on Transit, poems by David Baker

reviewed by Michael Collins

“So many varieties of transit take place, between modes of consciousness, different forms and self-states of writing and reading, awareness of experience, mortality, and textual legacy.”
Commentary |January 6, 2026

on Beckomberga, a novel by Sara Stridsberg, translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner

reviewed by Mark Athitakis

“Stridsberg’s concerns go beyond the usual fictional conflicts—she’s looking for deeper schisms between the sane and the mad, the living and the dead, despair over our fate and our acceptance of it.”
Commentary |January 6, 2026

on The New Economy, poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

reviewed by Kimberly Grey

“This doubleness — lament braided with exuberance, suffering braided with awe — structures the emotional, formal, and ethical terrain of the collection.”

Writing

Essay |April 5, 2007

Friday Night Fights in Florida: Contention From Wallace Stevens to Jay Hopler

an essay by Ron Slate

Wallace Stevens traveled to Florida as a businessman for the first time in 1922, and took two-to-three-week winter trips there for the next twenty years, leaving the wife at home. His right hand broke on making contact with Hemingway's jaw at a hotel bar in Key West in 1936, so one assumes he came to…