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, was published in 2025.
Proteus anguinusI live in a cave. Of course I’m immature.That’s how I can breathe underwater. I play the long game.You may never meet me. I can never be sure.I shine in the dark like a deep-sea fishing lure,an ambush predator’s dream, an eternal flamein a smoked-glass sleeve. Of course I’m immature.I can wait longer than you. I could even defermy next meal a decade,...
The music that showed me who I wanted to be, what I wanted from life, was the music that came out on Sarah Records.
‘The effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomisation, the disappearance of ... organised opposition,’ Hannah Arendt wrote. The resistance in the Twin Cities has not pushed ICE and CBP away yet, but it has turned a supposed projection of state power into a floundering tool of homicidal violence.
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.
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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