Tag: poetry
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I became intimately familiar with Whitney Hanson’s poetry recently, thanks to an Instagram reel I was shown by the Algorithm. I IMMEDIATELY pre-ordered her newest poetry book “the love of my life” and it arrived on the evening of its release day, July 7th, 2026. It showed up while I was taking a much needed…
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I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.” The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry…
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Emily Dickinson is famous for her idiosyncratic grammar, liberal use of the hyphen, and seemingly random capitalization of words. Despite using typical poetic devices such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration in her works, her poems take unique forms with layouts often making them a bit cryptic. Are these idiosyncrasies in her poetry a sign of…
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Is Langston Hughes a Modernist poet? That question, once handed to me in a college classroom, now strikes me as too small for the man who so clearly saw poetry as a public force. Labels like “Modernist” tend to flatten voices into movements. But Hughes resists neat categorization. Yes, he wrote in free verse. Indeed,…