2022: Poetry’s Year in Prose

This year, the Poetry Foundation published more than three dozen longform features—a trove of criticism and conversations that explores, celebrates, and provokes. Among this year’s pieces are incisive appraisals of new work by John Keene, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, and Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate; tributes to underappreciated figures such as Anna Mendelssohn, Forough Farrokhzad, Kathleen Tankersley Young, and Edwin Denby; fresh looks at John Milton, John Donne, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Ted Berrigan; interviews with, among others, John Lee Clark, Courtney Faye Taylor, Alice Notley, and Adrian Matejka, Poetry’s new editor; and deep dives into two landmark works celebrating their 100th anniversaries this year: Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We hope you’ll find much to enjoy here.

Happy holidays. And happy reading.     

— The Editors 

 

“Milton, You Should Be Living at This Hour”
Our understanding of John Milton's life and work has been scattered throughout the centuries. An inventive new biography seeks to make him whole.
By Ed Simon
(published January 10, 2022)

“Come Bless’d, Go Lost”
John Keene’s career-spanning new collection, Punks, is a shapeshifting inquiry into race, class, and sex.
By J. Howard Rosier
(published January 17, 2022)

“Descend in Daughters”
Bianca Stone’s new collection is an unflinching portrait of motherhood and the grief of her family’s famed matriarch.
By Sandra Simonds
(published January 24, 2022)

“His Vagabond Heart”
Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows at 100.
By Keith D. Leonard
(published January 31, 2022)

“You Wonderful Hot-Cold Thing”
Florine Stettheimer was a brilliant American painter of the 1920s and ’30s. As a new biography reminds us, she also wrote poems that share the idiosyncratic charm of her visual art.
By Lucy Ives
(published February 7, 2022)

“One Sumptuous Moment”
Richie Hofmann’s A Hundred Lovers, ostensibly an inventory of erotic encounters, invites readers into more than just the bedroom.
By Tyler Malone
(published February 14, 2022)

“Sound of the Axe on Fresh Wood”
Eavesdropping on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s diaries.
By Declan Ryan
(published February 21, 2022)

“Silent Forests of the Heart”
Niina Pollari writes into the astonishments of grief.
By Daisy Fried
(published February 28, 2022)

“Diane Wakoski Rides Again”
Written in the aftermath of an epic breakup, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems captured the early ’70s zeitgeist. How does a new edition read?
By Daniel Nester
(published March 7, 2022)

“On the Other Side of the Alphabet”
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif excavates the fraught political and cultural inheritances of language.
By Noah Warren
(published March 21, 2022)

“I Worship at the Shrine of Poetry”
Anna Mendelssohn, once imprisoned as an alleged terrorist, challenges easy truisms about the relation between politics and poetry.
By David Grundy
(published March 28, 2022)

“Controlled Burn”
Forough Farrokhzad’s forthright poems of desire.
By Rhian Sasseen
(published April 11, 2022)

“Maybe He Is a Comet”
An inadvertent autobiography and a posthumous collection capture Tomaž Šalamun’s ethic of astonishment.
By David Schurman Wallace
(published April 18, 2022)

“Nothing to Hide Under All This Sun”
In Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong puzzles over language—and his own history.
By Paul Mendez
(published April 25, 2022)

“Pretty Birds Past the Strip Mall”
Ada Limón’s field guide for life on a damaged planet.
By Kathleen Rooney
(published May 9, 2022)

“This Body, This Rapture”
Two poets—one a maximalist and the other a miniaturist—explore the mysteries of inner experience.
By Ratik Asokan
(published May 16, 2022)

“Positive Rigor”
A conversation with Adrian Matejka, Poetry’s new editor.
By Rowan Ricardo Phillips
(published May 23, 2022)

“All Words Refugees”
The work of the German-Swedish poet Nelly Sachs ranges between atrocity and grace.
By Richard Hegelman
(published June 6, 2022)

“Because I Have Not Existed”
The Collected Works of Kathleen Tankersley Young reintroduces an enigmatic poet at the center of American Modernism.
By Michelle A. Taylor
(published June 20, 2022)

“Somewhere Listening for Their Names”
Amidst the AIDS crisis and mass homophobia, the annual OutWrite conference gave LGBTQ writers a community in the 1990s.
By Eric Sneathen
(published June 27, 2022)

“What Do I Want With Eternity?”
Jay Hopler’s final collection, Still Life, joins a canon of work by poets facing mortality.
By Craig Morgan Teicher
(published July 11, 2022)

“Permanent Transience”
Lisa Robertson’s Boat works against the certainties much poetry strives to achieve.
By Dan Beachy-Quick
(published July 18, 2022)

“A Fog and a Chronicle”
For Renee Gladman, drawing and writing function as two sides of the same verbal art.
By Nicole Rudick
(published July 25, 2022)

“Knot Writing”
The poetry of Cecilia Vicuña's soft sculptures.
By John Vincler
(published August 1, 2022)

“Banquet of Ash”
Jana Prikryl's Midwood is a strange and ecstatic portrait of middle age.
By Dustin Illingworth
(published August 8, 2022)

“A Little World Made Cunningly”
Super-Infinite, a new biography of John Donne, presents the poet in all of his piety and lust.
By Ed Simon
(published August 15, 2022)

“The In-Between”
What made Rilke great?
By Lesley Chamberlain
(published August 22, 2022)

“Histories of the Future Frontier”
Rio Cortez on Afropioneerism out West.
By J. Howard Rosier
(published August 29, 2022)

“You Know This, You Know This”
The boredom of dystopia in Elisa Gabbert's Normal Distance.
By Jameson Fitzpatrick
(published September 12, 2022)

“What Do I Say Next? Fast.”
On Ted Berrigan’s exuberant and idiosyncratic prose.
By Jordan Davis
(published September 19, 2022)

“She Really Enjoyed Him”
Alice Notley on her life with Ted Berrigan.
By Garrett Caples
(published September 19, 2022)

“Feelings Are Our Facts”
Edwin Denby made his name as a dance critic, but his poetry was a pivotal influence on the writers and artists of the New York School.
By Nick Sturm
(published September 26, 2022)

“Reality Is Wild and on the Wing”
Before she wrote one of the longest novels in history, Marguerite Young found her voice in poetry.
By Steven Moore
(published October 3, 2022)

“A Bird Translates Silence”
Wong May updates the Tang Dynasty poets for the 21st century.
By Dennis Zhou
(published October 17, 2022)

“Walking in an Empire”
A year before the 1992 LA Uprising, a Black teenager named Latasha Harlins was killed in a corner store. Concentrate, Courtney Faye Taylor’s debut, revisits that tragedy—and the life that preceded it.
By Amaud Jamaul Johnson
(published October 24, 2022)

“Never Static”
Will Alexander on poetry, consciousness, and the energy of language.
By Jenna Peng
(October 31, 2022)

“She Is Her. I Am Her.”
H.D.’s autobiographical novel asks: What's in a name?
By Tyler Malone
(published November 7, 2022)

“What Is This That’s Happening Now?”
Bernadette Mayer writes through the pandemic.
By André Naffis-Sahely
(published November 14, 2022)

“An X-Ray of the Soul”
Remembering the poets of Attica Correctional Facility.
By Lizzy LeRud
(published November 21, 2022)

“All Sorts of Secret Treasure”
The DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark finds his native language.
By Rachel Kolb
(published November 28, 2022)

“Having Their Say”
Stephanie McCarter on her feminist translation of Ovid.
By Lily Meyer
(published November 28, 2022)

"Dig It Up Again"
A century of the Waste Land.
By Ryan Ruby
(published December 12, 2023)