America's Most Critical Journal since 1999
Drunk Commentary on Archibald MacLeish’s “‘Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments’” by David Galef The praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems, —a shout-out to Phil Sidney! Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes, —damn,... More »
Watch the ‘poets’ guzzling booze grinning enviously (they never refuse) the book being launched has a title that is easy to wear ‘Sonnets from Spooky Silent-Sessions with my Snakeskin Teddy Bear’ Rebecca Frost is calling the poets to order switc... More »
by Lisa Rosenberg Dear Miss Dickinson, Ms. Plath, and Mr. Eliot, My reveries of having tea with the three of you are repeatedly marred by an intrusive image of this transpiring at a supermarket Starbucks. In the suburbs. * Dear Reader, Not wanting to disappoin... More »
by Kevin Higgins The well made poem puts on its dicky bow, walks to the top of the hill, and has what it calls an epiphany. The well made poem sees every side of the argument, except those proscribed by the BBC. The well made poem has between twelve and twenty... More »
by Kevin Higgins after Ocean Vuong Because the poodle’s polka dot collar lying luminous at the bottom of the stairs was an exclamation mark discarded from a poem. Because all your relatives kept turning up — & the kettle exploded from our ov... More »
By Martin H. Levinson Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry not sorry I could not walk on both For fear of missing out, long I stood and looked down one as far as someone who is woke could To where it seemed kind of bent in the un... More »
by Kevin Higgins “The sky is high / We shit on earth / We look up the sky / The earth gives birth / To our future”, Yoko Ono, Poetry (July/August 2018) (i) The Christmas lights which bat their eyelids all year round on the screaming pink terracotta roof ar... More »
by Michael Gessner It’s good you died when you did, or you would have lived to see your darling daughter’s demise in her prime, with two little ones in the next room, precious as honey in a hive. But you escaped—talk about an act of god—in medias res... More »
By Andrew Kuhn 28 August 2016 (With apologies to Wallace Stevens) For if betimes this polymath of paregoric fumbled for a formula as apt as that which summed his seldom-ciphered sibilants— englobed as gorgeous lexic embolisms bobbing in a bouillon sie... More »
The Satirist features original works of satire and parody, especially literary artifacts, as well as serious criticism and book reviews. The Satirist publishes satirical news as seen in The Onion, but these are just for topical amusement; they don’t ge... More »
Imaginary review by Dan Geddes 19 October 1999 One overlooked, undoubtedly tragic, consequence of the Cold War was the isolation of Eastern European artists and philosophers. Suppressed, imprisoned or even executed, some of these creative geniuses were prevent... More »