For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages.

November 14, 2025 – “With her pen, Antonius rebuilds villages and cities, replants crops, observes the weather, curates ...

My death is starting to assume shape in the distance, however hazy. So is the recognition that nearly everything I own will ...

November 7, 2025 – "Woolf likely imagined these cards would end up in a garbage can or, at best, someone’s attic." ...

#6 E——— on “How and Why I Have Come to be Totally Devoted to S——— and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence” And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had ...

This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day, ...

I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing ...

Evening fell. This could be seen easily through the glass greenhouse windows. Now certainty had been established.” ...

It’s fifty degrees in January, and the air in the Garment District smells strangely of pea soup. The building I’ve been directed to is supposed to be an art gallery, but all I can find is an ...

Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and ...

The fairy tales of Mary-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronesse d’Aulnoy—first published in French in the 1690s—are full of jewel-like foods, poisoned drinks, and violent feats of baking. The ...