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." ...

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

A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles.

After eight glorious weeks of freedom, I got rehired. First thing I did was walk over to the machine shop to look for my F-150. The oil stain was there but the truck wasn’t. It wasn’t in the rock lot ...

In The Philosophy, the artist Andy Warhol tells us relatively little about how he became Warhol. He shares parts of his story in this series of aperçus about death, love, taxes, and beauty, among ...

Marguerite Duras’s Le navire Night (The ship named Night) is both a film and a would-be film, or rather a documentary of a film that the writer decided never to finish. Duras abandoned her initial ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

When Stasik the Mosquito fell for Alla the Pig, she wouldn’t even look at him. She just lay there, totally nude on the beach, fanning herself with her ears—he was too scared to even try to fly up to ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...