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“... By​ 1979, when Rae Armantrout published her second book, The Invention of Hunger, with Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press, she was already what much of the literary world would soon learn to call a ‘language poet’. Like Hejinian, like their Bay Area friend and ally Ron Silliman, and like the writers from the East Coast who ran the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Armantrout sought a recalcitrant, even opaque, way of writing that could get out from under the assumptions, conventions and restrictions of (among other things) capitalism, patriarchy, Romantic lyric, transparent exposition and prose sense ...”

“... 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 pan-American history ...”

“... 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, racial distinction and white supremacy ...”

“... Where Now​ is Laura Kasischke’s tenth book of verse (Copper Canyon, £23). She has also written young adult novels, science fiction, historical fiction, books you might label as mysteries or thrillers, and realist novels about present-day adults – 22 books in all over 25 years. Usually, when I read a big Selected, I find myself thinking about how the poet has changed, how far she has come, or else about her limits and when she began to spin her wheels ...”

“... blame her parents, because she, Allaround, doesn’t know they were involved, although I, Stephanie, do. What will she do when she finds out? How will she handle the realisation that you can clobber individuals, or try to bring them before the law, but you can’t beat up an institution, like capitalism or the Olympics?Last night Allaround and her ...”

“... Adrienne Rich’s new poems show qualities that almost require the label ‘late style’. They are made up of fragments, careless of finish and of audience. In technique, as well as in explicit subjects, they account for debilities and advancing years, which they also fiercely defy, and they look back so insistently to her earlier work that they may not seem designed to stand up on their own ...”

“... The first collection published by D.A. Powell, Tea (1998), looked oddly like a smart restaurant menu: Wesleyan University Press manufactured a shiny, green and gilt hardback, six inches tall and nine inches wide, to accommodate Powell’s very short poems and very long lines. The promise the cover gave was borne out inside, where those long lines flaunted multiple midline stops, unruly punctuation (stopping where the grammar said go), terse yet explicit depictions of gay sex and profuse quotation from disco hits: now the mirrored rooms seem comic ...”

“... Traffic right now on the Connecticut Turnpike is doing quite well. The southbound side does see construction through Stamford. Watch for lanes being closed between exits 9 and 7. It’s blocking at least one lane ’til six a.m. Once you make it down to the city line you’re OK here. The Westchester County portion of the New England Thruway right on down through the Bronx on through the, uh, Bruckner Expressway are looking good right to the Triboro Bridge ...”

“... It is almost always better for a good poet to be recognised than to remain obscure. And yet it might well frustrate a good poet – and it ought to frustrate his readers – when he gets recognised for the wrong things. Frank Bidart first became famous in America (famous, that is, as American poets go) for the grisly violence of his dramatic monologues, for his poems’ unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems ...”

“... It must feel odd – and more than a bit unsettling – to realise that sooner or later, perhaps in your lifetime, somebody will write your biography. Biographers can get lives badly wrong; and even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner life ...”

“... Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the old gnarled banged-up biddy-assed tree and I kept ducking and hugging and bobbing as if you were a tub of water on Hallowe’en it was fun but you threw yourself into reverse like a tractor hugging the ground in spring that was nice too more rain more raincoat                                  (‘Adventures In Living’) Who was O’Hara, and how did he learn to write like that? Born in 1926, he grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, studied piano seriously throughout high school and served in the Navy at the close of World War II ...”

“... It’s kind of like Facebook, but in person,’ a Boston woman says of the camping ground where her friends take holidays. Two San Francisco teens vow to use Facebook just once a month; ‘It’s like any other addiction,’ a psychologist tells the New York Times. A burglar in West Virginia gets caught after checking his Facebook page in the house he broke into ...”

“... Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T ...”

“... Prodigious and frustrating, welcoming and cantankerous, Les Murray’s body of work has made him both Australia’s best-known poet and its most powerful. Full of Australian history, places and things, his poetry also displays the more abstract qualities Murray likes to think of as Australian. Chief among these is ‘sprawl’, defined as ease, cheerful excess, unbuttonedness and unsnobbish self-confidence: ‘Sprawl is really classless ...”

“... The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s own critics: since his death in 1963, attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With Williams, more than the usual number of isms and caricatures need to be cleared away ...”