How Each Line Appears | some loose leaves January 04, 2021 Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as “a master of musicality and enlightening allusions.” In the wholly original world of these poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls “creating between liberties.” Read More
Sexuality, gender, and race in the Middle Ages December 18, 2020 While the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Read More
The mountain memories that fuelled Tolkien’s epic tales December 14, 2020 ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.’ Bilbo Baggins is thinking of adventure, of course, not pandemics. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’ Yet The Lord of the Rings is a lesson in how far you can travel without leaving home. Read More
Bob Dylan’s rowdy ways and American voice September 25, 2020 One of the great ironies surrounding Bob Dylan’s 2016 reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature is that, at the time of the prize, the great songwriter had just released a pair of recordings that featured no compositions of his own. Read More
Roy Foster | On Seamus Heaney September 10, 2020 The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. Read More
Listen in: Finding humanity through fairy tales July 14, 2020 Ever since I began a collaboration with Princeton University Press in 2008 to found the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series, almost all the books we have published have been somewhat political but not didactic. Read More
Be Enchanted July 01, 2020 The imaginative and often dangerous world of fairy tales spins common human experience in a way that feels strangely vital. Read More
Erica McAlpine on The Poet’s Mistake June 17, 2020 Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth’s lakes. Poetry—even by the greats—is rife with mistakes. Read More
Listen in: Lives of Houses May 05, 2020 What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? Read More
By Design | Oddly Modern Fairy Tales April 24, 2020 Fairy tales exert a keen influence on the collective imagination. By turns entertaining and frightening, didactic and illuminating, they are the stuff of dreams, but also of reality. Read More
Reading Callimachus through comics April 17, 2020 Comics and illustration—siblings or cousins, related in so many ways—are deeply hybrid art forms. Read More
“Canzone d’aprile” by Giovanni Pascoli April 06, 2020 The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation embraces a wide geographic and temporal range, from the Tang dynasty to modern-day Europe, from Latin America to the subcontinent of India. Read More
Poems from Szilárd Borbély’s Final Matters April 03, 2020 Szilárd Borbély, one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from post-Communist Hungary, received numerous literary awards in his native country. In this volume, acclaimed translator Ottilie Mulzet reveals the full range and force of Borbély’s verse by bringing together generous selections from his last two books, Final Matters and To the Body. Read More
In Dialogue with Kathleen Graber and Eleanor Wilner: The ethical aspirations of poetry April 02, 2020 Throughout history, poets have rallied against autocracies, served as moral beacons in times of crisis, while others have intentionally avoided moral absolutes. We asked poets Kathleen Graber and Eleanor Wilner what ethical or moral aspirations and obligations they hope their own poems embody or enact. Read More
Where poems may exist, now April 01, 2020 In the building across from mine, inside the top-center window, an American flag hangs vertically. I see it every day, every morning. My desk faces it. I face it. Read More
