August Kleinzahler

I found under the tongue, when he opened wide, a harvest of minuscule Thai red peppers clustered either side of his pink frenulum, twin fields of fiery stalagmites. And as if that were not passing strange enough, behind and above two shelves of tiny Lucite drawers to my alarm one of which you chose to open and examine closely in its moist mucosa casing before gently replacing it, and...

– Elvis is dead, the radio said, where it sat behind a fresh baked loaf of bread and broken link of kobasc fetched only lately from Boucherie Hongroise:Still Life without Blue Pitcher. I read that piece of meat as if I were Chaim Soutine, with its capillaries and tiny kernels of fat, bound up in its burnt sienna casing. There and then the motif came to me that would anchor my early...

Christopher Middleton​ hated New York. Among the things he particularly disliked, I suspect, is New York’s position as a cultural bazaar, where reputations are bought, sold and traded, with the attendant buzz of speculation. He was incapable of schmoozing, and his career suffered accordingly. New York’s greatest draw, people action and brute energy, would have been lost on him.

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James Merrill​ has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to boot. Merrill would have hated to be the subject of a plodding biography. He was all about stylishness and elegance, in poetry and in life. But James Merrill: Life and Art shows that you should be careful...