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Larry Eigner’s work has been foundational for contemporary American poetry. What was missing was the biography, which now, thanks to the storied Modern and Contemporary Poetics series of the University of Alabama Press, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, we have. Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, is a terrific book. I, as they say, couldn’t put it down, finishing it in a day, and wishing for more.

Adam Pendleton builds on themes of language and representation with his first solo show in Canada, at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

The job of a poet is to find the precise word to convey emotion, but David Melnick had a...

Author's Note: This essay was originally presented as a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution. Many thanks to Atom Atkinson and the organizers of the Chautauqua Literary Arts Program. In the weeks in the run-up to Easter, my nana, Pastora Mendoza, teases for breakfast the raw egg from the pinhole she’s carefully punctured in order to keep the eggshell whole and unbroken. After she has washed and dried it, she’ll save the shell safely back in its carton. With four or five dozen collected, she’ll color the shells—dipping them in dyes, ladling and cradling the empty eggs with a tablespoo...

Bitte, Ich Spreche Nur Amerikanisch I’d like to bracket these observations between two half-remembered New Yorker cartoons. The first shows three people, a woman and two men, each tops in their fields, being interviewed by a man who has asked them to identify three people who’ve influenced them. The woman, a writer, mentions Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, and Chekhov; the golfer names Arnold Palmer, Tiger Woods, and, to everyone’s surprise, Chekhov; finally the physicist rattles off his list: Einstein, Newton, and . . . yes, you guessed it, Chekhov. The importance of translation, anyone...