Stephanie Burt

Monica Youn’s​ fourth book of poems, From From (Carcanet, £14.99), is her first to dwell at length on her Korean American background, and on the history of Asian America more generally. It’s also her first to rely primarily on long prose poems, or lyric essays, advancing sparely perspicuous, caustically disillusioned arguments about myth and history, cravings and reactions,...

Because each year of your life amounts         to less of your lifethan the year before, the things in it change you less.

Horse chestnuts, for example,         beside you in the almost-ready-for-morning frosted grass

as you walk to your car, or         one horse chestnut in particular,its dry spiked ball on a flail

Brandon Som​ was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, the son of a Chinese American father and a Mexican American mother. His grandfather’s arduous journey from Asia to the US, his grandmother’s time in a microchip factory on the border, his relatives’ work in barbers’, butchers’ and corner shops could form the basis of a memoir, autobiographical novel or case study in...

How often​ has a book of poetry scared you? Natalie Shapero’s third collection, Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, £12.99), with its barbs and quips and dry double meanings, suggests that life, at least in Western civilisation, is not worth living. In ‘And Stay Out’, the idea that ‘slaughter has coarsened the population’ becomes all too plausible:

the only ones...

Dungeons & Dragons​, the fantasy role-playing game that filled the afternoons of geeky teenagers throughout the 1980s, is still going strong. CNBC reported that D&D ‘had its biggest year ever’ in 2020, with sales of books and other game material growing by 33 per cent – a way of surviving lockdown? The company that publishes the books, Wizards of the Coast, claims...