Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will.” ...

My mamaw used to say, ‘I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing ...

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

It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not ...

My friend gave me the packet of letters to keep, and I knew that one day I would try to make something out of it.” ...

This essay may sound strange, read by a man—it is very specifically a woman ’s essay. But Dombek’s voice is so powerful, every time I read “Letter from Williamsburg,” I hear it in my head. It’s like a ...

Geoffrey Chaucer “provides our earliest ex. of twitter, verb: of a bird: to utter a succession of light tremulous notes; to chirp continuously.” See this, and his other contributions to language, on ...

André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the ...

Pablo Neruda 1904–1971 Pablo Neruda, born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile, is regarded as one of Latin America’s most significant poets. The winner of the 1971 Nobel ...

Have you heard the news? Two weeks ago we launched our very own iPad/iPhone app, which features new issues, rare back issues, and archival collections—along with our complete interview series and the ...

When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly ...

Vinca is a complex little plant, and periwinkle, named for its blossoms, is an equally complex color. A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears ...