2024: Poetry's Year in Prose

Over the last 12 months, the Poetry Foundation has been hard at work, publishing nearly three dozen longform features—everything from critical essays to profiles, from hybrid experiments to interviews. Among the pieces are provocative (re)considerations of canonical figures such as Anthony Hecht, C.K. Williams, Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, Seamus Heaney, and Reginald Shepherd. We also looked abroad to highlight poets in translation including Liliane Giraudon, Wolfgang Hilbig, Lutz Seiler, and others. Our second-ever digital folio introduced readers to Tilsa Otta, a contemporary Peruvian poet whose daring work is at once cosmic and erotic. Other pieces shed light on overlooked poets like the troubled Transcendentalist Jones Very or the Hollywood darling Alice Duer Miller. There’s something here for readers of every taste.

Happy holidays. And happy reading.  

—    The Editors

More Light
A new biography and a Collected Poems make the case for Anthony Hecht’s greatness.
By A.E. Stallings

A Brawl of Angels
Sleep collects the incandescent English-language poems of the multilingual Italian poet Amelia Rosselli. 
By Joyelle McSweeney

Getting Messianic
Seamus Heaney’s letters present a mostly congenial poet with a dogged work ethic and a desire to not be anyone's spokesman.
By Declan Ryan

A Voice From the Tomb
Jones Very's divine possession briefly captivated the Transcendentalists, but his idealism proved a trap.
By Daegan Miller

Writing Inside the Holes
For more than four decades, the French poet Liliane Giraudon has written experimental, sensual, and politically demanding work.
By Léon Pradeau

But There Are Other Geometries
On cubes, love, and fate.
By A.V. Marraccini

Out of Your Head and Into Your Body
Six decades of revolution with John Sinclair. 
By Rebecca Kosick

Sweatshop of the Eye
Perception shapes fear and desire in Gregory Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence.
By Anthony Reed

Eternity Only Will Answer
Funny, convivial, chatty—a new edition of Emily Dickinson's letters upends the myth of her reclusive genius. 
By Maya C. Popa

More Even Than Itself
A career-spanning selection of C.K. Williams underscores his restless virtuosity.
By Daisy Fried

Not Senseless, Not Angels
For nearly a half-century, Alice Duer Miller wrote sardonic and defiantly feminist work that found favor from Hollywood to the White House.
By Joy Lanzendorfer

There’s Nothing in the World Smaller Than the Universe
In The Invention of the Darling, Li-Young Lee presents divinity as spirit and matter, profound and quotidian, sacred and profane.
By Ed Simon

He Became a Fabulous Opera
Delmore Schwartz is often touted as an exemplary literary tragedy. A long-overdue Collected Poems showcases his extravagant genius—and his failures.
By R.K. Hegelman

Look At Me, and I Will Look At You
In Two Minds, Callie Siskel reflects on the ghost of her famous father.
By J. Howard Rosier

Attached and Riveted
The links between queer memory, activism, and transpoetics in Julian Carter’s Dances of Time and Tenderness.  
By Megan Milks

The Stoker
Wolfgang Hilbig wrote poems of gothic lyricism while laboring in Germany's bleak industrial landscapes.
By Matthew Spencer

The Crown Prince of Bad Judgment 
From the beginning of his career, Bill Knott presented himself as an outsider, an underdog, and a combative “minor poet.”
By Sandra Simonds

Poet, Prophet, Prodigy
For James Baldwin on his 100th birthday.
By Joshua Bennett

I Placed My Fate in Hard Hands
Else Lasker-Schüler, a darling of Berlin’s avant-garde, fought to define herself—even through tragedy and exile.
By Robert Rubsam

An Urn and a Plot, Steak and Champagne
JoAnna Novak’s poems of domestic dread.
By Alana Pockros

Arsy-versy Argy-bargy
How Chaucer remade language.
By Camille Ralphs

Roaming With Clouds and Water
The Same Moon Shines on All collects the poems of a husband and wife who crisscrossed 19th-century Japan, writing poems in classical Chinese and engaging in shadowy political work.  
By Nick Admussen

Nomad for Love: A Tilsa Otta Folio
A Peruvian poet whose work is at once cosmic, erotic, and fabulist.
Edited by Farid Matuk

Where Desire Plays Out as Allegory
On Reginald Shepherd's erotic and lyric possibilities. 
By Brian Teare

In Defense of Mimicry
On translation, the body, and excess.
By Johannes Göransson

In Place of Memory, Belief
Carl Phillips’s latest poems suggest directness and clarity are neither possible nor perfect in art.
By Nick Ripatrazone

My Only Rule Is to Break Rules
August Kleinzahler on A History of Western Music. 
By Daisy Fried

Bottle in Which I Live
On Mike Kelley’s Kandors and the poetry of Superman.
By Leah Mandel

The Caliban of Old Blighty
W.H. Auden's conflicted love of England is front and center in The Island.
By Declan Ryan

Shock and Ore
The German poet Lutz Seiler has spent his career making song from the ruins of history.
By Alexander Wells

Coming Undone
On Context Collapse, Ryan Ruby’s vertiginous secret history of poetry.
By Jared Marcel Pollen

The Ecstasy of Jan Beatty
She is the punk laureate of working-class Pittsburgh, and her poems are equal part protest and jeremiad. 
By Ed Simon

A Hotel for Poets
Fifty years after it was published, Elsa’s Housebook remains an intimate photographic document of the literary avant-garde.
By Jackson Davidow