Ange Mlinko

The argument​ laid out in the first four poems of Some Say, Maureen McLane’s newest collection (Farrar, Straus, £20), encapsulates the one she makes in the whole book, and in all her poetry. The collection starts out in medias res, with the first poem’s title, ‘As I was saying, the sun’, taking a running leap into the poem itself: ‘& the moon and all...

Fanny Howe​ is so adept at creating floating worlds, gossamer meditations on being and art, that a reader might mistake autobiographical anecdotes for fables. In the final piece in her 2009 essay collection, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, she goes to a café in Paris to meet an unnamed older woman, vaguely a colleague, whose existential pronouncements bear down harshly: ‘You...

Beauty is a fight to the finish, though you want to educate the decorum away. Here, in the bruised atmosphere of a tropical storm, we wait for the rain band to diminish,

considering horses. Your student had one shipped from Holland. ‘A horse does not want to be Fedexed.’ (Could one apply dressage to text? Have it perform at one’s command? Banish felicitous accident?)

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Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers. As it turns out, you’re not...

‘Dear Tenant,

Right before my husband left, he did me a good deed. He hung a heavy mirror I had bought at an estate sale, bevelled, gilt, uncommonly clear. It was as though I’d freed him to do what he neglects to do when chores entail … what? Fairness? This was a gift. It hangs above eye level, more to catch the light of the ceiling lamp than to reflect the faces of his...