Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp., $30. As Reviewed By: Carol Bere “I wish I had written a great deal more. Sometimes I think if I had been born a man, I probably would [...]

On “Born Yesterday” For those familiar with Philip Larkin’s work, the title of this short essay will seem to offer a juxtaposition so improbable as to be laugh-out-loud funny-rather like that old joke staple, the tiny book titled German Humor, or the admittedly unlikely prospect of a panel at a New Formalist conference on “The [...]

About the Size of It by Tom Disch. Anvil Press Poetry Ltd, 2007. As Reviewed By: Dan Brown Tom Disch’s first book of poems in ten years has the heft you’d expect of a collection so long in preparation: eighty poems spanning almost 150 long-format pages. The book is divided into sections whose titles speak [...]

As Reviewed By: Ben Downing It was his sonnet “A Bookmark” that first caught my attention. “Four years ago I started reading Proust,” the poem begins, and goes on to skewer Remembrance of Things Past and its mincing narrator-”Oh, what a slimy sort he must have been- / So weak, so sweetly poisonous, so fey!”-with [...]

About the Size of It by Tom Disch. Anvil, 160 pages, $16.95 As Reviewed By: Eric Ormsby It takes a brave poet these days to praise the beauties of obesity. Our poets tend to celebrate emaciated muses, often in verses as spindly as their beloveds. It wasn’t always so. Arab poets, in the days before [...]

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar “A spiritual life doesn’t require taking Holy Orders, only a decision to submit to a lifelong discipline.” – Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008 Few American poet-critics since Edgar Allan Poe have brought a practitioner’s knowledge of writing genre fiction to the service of poetry reviewing. It is a commonplace and, like [...]

Thomas M. Disch. The Priest: A Gothic Romance. Alfred A. Knopf 1995. 352 pp. Tom Disch. Dark Verses & Light. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1991. 144 pp. Tom Disch. Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1989. 112 pp. Thomas M. Disch. The Tale of Dan De Lion. (Drawings by [...]

XJK: I like the sound of words and the fun of putting them together. When I first made fumbling attempts to write, I tried writing fiction too. I wrote extensive imitations of Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, but those projects didn’t get anyplace. Actually, later on I wrote some science fiction for pulp magazines, two fantasy novels for children, and some stories in little magazines.

Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008, by X. J. Kennedy. BOA Editions, 2007. $17.00pb. Reviewed By: David Mason Here it is, folks, almost free of charge-another taxonomical declaration! In our time there are precisely two kinds of poets: populists and snots. The populists believe that something generally referred to as “the world” is more important [...]

Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber Read: X. J. Kennedy’s “The Pacifier” It’s rare nowadays to find maxims and adages embedded in poems, though verses were once a common and accepted way of transmitting received wisdom. But X. J. Kennedy violates many contemporary norms and expectations in poems that wander the ill-defined territory between humorous and whimsical. [...]