Stephanie Burt is a poet and professor of English literature at Harvard. She is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age, The Art of the Sonnet and After Callimachus, a selection of translations, some of which were first published in the LRB. Advice from the Lights, a collection of poems, came out in 2017. Her book about Taylor Swift, Taylor’s Version, is due in October.
No modern poet has had a career quite like Richard Siken’s. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded,...
Remember shoegaze? If you’re under forty you won’t, though you might have come across it later. It’s the rock music that took over indie charts, and critics’ chatter, from about 1989 to 1992. Mid-tempo, meditative, sometimes earsplittingly loud but emotionally subdued, shoegaze offered fuzzy, layered guitar lines with smoky, blurred timbres; tremolo bars, odd tunings and effects pedals; reverb-heavy, warbling vocals, sung by fey men and (less often) confident women. It was invented in Dublin and London by My Bloody Valentine on Isn’t Anything(1988) and Loveless (1991), and played beautifully by (among others) Ride, Swervedriver and Lush.
Girl Violence, the third album by King Princess, is my favourite pop record in a good year for pop. It’s all over the place sonically, a hungry scavenger for scraps of slow R&B, thumping rock choruses, indie guitar fuzz, doo-wop references, half-spoken bridges and half-shouted anthemic claims. It’s first-rate popcraft made to hold emotional chaos. And it has, through thirteen tracks, a single subject: how it feels to enter an abusive Sapphic romance or romantic friendship, how to live with it, how to leave, and why people stay.
Forrest Gander’s first collection of poems appeared in 1988. He grew up in Virginia and his early work seemed like that of an elegant regionalist. With cut-glass concision, he often took a long look at earth, rocks, landscapes. ‘If not a writer, then I would probably be a geologist,’ he said in 2005. He planned to study palaeontology, but was diagnosed with melanoma in...
Williamstown, MA
Barely and barely ableto be seen through, theseflat wind-skimming seeds
like little microphonescan amplify the windin any direction. Having
persuaded one anotherin casual confidencethat they will go far, they have chosen
a bad trade: what’s leftof summer for winter; osmoticsatisfaction for sporadic rain;a life in the sun for unpredictable shade,like the one the hurricane...
Sonnets have no rival. They’ve been written about kingfishers, love, squirrels, the moon (too often), God, despair, more love, grief, exultation, time, decay, church bells beyond the stars...
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