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Poets

The Body Politic

by Emily Witt,

The battle over Pablo Neruda’s corpse

Say Watt?

From a letter by Samuel Beckett, dated February 14, 1957, responding with what he called “heart-felt sympathy” to queries from a German translator of his 1935 poetry collection Echo’s Bones…

Mostpeople’s Poet

by Ruth Franklin,

Is E. E. Cummings a serious writer?

New Books

by Christine Smallwood,

It is inevitable that some readers will take from Evelyn Barish’s biography of the life and misdeeds of Paul de Man the notion that literary theory is a crock. The title…

Fei Fei

by Liao Yiwu,Translated by Wenguang Huang,

By Liao Yiwu, from For a Song and a Hundred Songs, out next month from New Harvest. Liao, who was born in China in 1958, spent four years in prison…

Lines of Occupation

by Joshua Cohen,

The post-Zionist poetics of Yitzhak Laor

Masquerades

by Fernando Pessoa,Translated by Richard Zenith,

From a selection of posthumously discovered prose pieces published, for the first time in English, in the October issue of Poetry Magazine. By the time of his death in 1935,…

Paper Pushkin

by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin,Translated by Simona Schneider,

From two 1824 letters by Aleksandr Pushkin to Aleksandr Kaznacheev. The first is in response to an assignment to investigate the extermination of locusts that Pushkin refused to undertake; the…

Yelp

by Allen Ginsberg,

Literature’s great divide

by Charles Baxter,

Before the Beat Goes On