“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it. By Elisa Gabbert I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a ...

There is an appropriateness, somehow, in turning to ”Next-to-Last Things” in this, the waning of the year. It is that kind of book: Portrait of the artist as an old man. One pictures the 80-year-old ...

Friendship, for poets, has long been grist for the mill. Anyone studying poetry is likely to stumble upon literary friendships – William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge come instantly to mind, ...

Alexie never thought he could leave his reservation to pursue a writing career—but a line written by Adrian C. Louis taught him to venture outside the "reservation of his mind." But in an interview ...

One of the highlights of my first three years as a literature professor at MIT—and indeed, of my 15-year career as an educator—has been the recent discovery that some of my students, past and present, ...