William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
Love’s Labor’s Lost by William Shakespeare My rating: 4 of 5 stars This early Shakespearean comedy, dating from the 1590s, is paradoxically slight but weighty, thin but dense. That’s no … Continue reading
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe My rating: 5 of 5 stars Goethe’s Faust, including Part One and Part Two, was written over the entire course of the author’s adult … Continue reading
Hart Crane, The Bridge
The Bridge by Hart Crane My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Bridge (1930) is a long poem seven years in the making. It was written under several varieties of … Continue reading
Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith My rating: 4 of 5 stars This celebrated 2011 volume from the current U.S. poet laureate is her elegy for her father, a … Continue reading
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Hamlet by William Shakespeare My rating: 5 of 5 stars Why is this bizarre, disorderly, long, and poorly transmitted tragedy from the turn of the seventeenth century the central work … Continue reading
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich My rating: 3 of 5 stars In the blurb on the cover of this paperback, Margaret Atwood promises that this book … Continue reading
My Year in Books, 2017
But let’s start with movies. Ten years ago, the Scottish musician and critic Momus observed that one of the most acclaimed films of 2007, Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish-Civil-War fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, … Continue reading
Dante, Paradiso
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri My rating: 4 of 5 stars Here is what you’ve heard about the Divine Comedy: the Inferno, with its poignantly vivid tortures and its cacophony of wicked … Continue reading
Dante, Purgatorio
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri My rating: 4 of 5 stars Allen Mandelbaum begins his introduction to his wonderful translation thusly: For the Virgil of Dante’s Purgatorio, “love is the … Continue reading
Claudia Rankine, Citizen
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine My rating: 3 of 5 stars Citizen is a prose-poetry compendium of racial microaggressions aimed at a poetic speaker who nevertheless speaks in … Continue reading
