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.
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...
where I grew upit was all wonderful anddefensive
the adults were kindand never neglectfulbringing fresh water and
grapes oranges and juiceand sunscreen always askingeach kid what we would
need or might need in theanticipated future with itsgoldenrod-bordered
cleared fieldits soft blacktopits estimated yield
we were told to look upwith reason to keeplooking forward
to a cloudless...
Doppelgangbanger, the second collection of poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Haymarket, £12), describes growing up Black in white suburbia. In ‘Hip-Hop Introspective’:
Kids ask what FUBU means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the wall.I’m beside myself...
Visual depictions of suicide kill. We buried Melanie that morning;the day after, Basil died. I don’t know what he saw,or what she did, but I know I’ve seen too many pictures of obliviondone up as heaven –This isn’t a poem so much as a warning. ...
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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