Katha Pollitt

There’s something so American about Rae Armantrout’s poetry. It has the sudden breaks, the start-and-stop of Emily Dickinson; the direct colloquial speaking voice of William Carlos Williams; the abstract playfulness of John Ashbery. Her poems offer a constant sense of reinvention, and an invitation to the reader to make it

If you don’t know Alissa Quart’s poetry—and you definitely should—you may know her as the prose writer of Bootstrapped, Squeezed, and numerous other books about the economic struggles of ordinary Americans. (She’s also the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, which supports journalism about

How thrilling to include poems by Joy Ladin in the very first issue of LIBER. She’s a wonderful and prolific poet, with nine books and counting. Her most recent, The Book of Anna, won this year’s National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the first trans woman to

What a pleasure to introduce five poems by the prolific and brilliant Molly Peacock, queen of rhyme and meter, who has done so much to bring contemporary freshness and zing and a sometimes-startling intimacy to formal poetry. In this grouping, Peacock writes about the death of her husband, Joyce scholar

We’re often told that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Historically, newcomers have been expected to be grateful and to blend into the dominant culture, and that’s what a lot of them have done. My grandparents left what is now Belarus in 1920 and made a great life

When I accepted three of Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s poems I didn’t realize that, in different ways, they were about the dialogue of life and death. That’s a measure of her variety of tone and her skill as both a poet and a storyteller. In “To Live,” a father is killed by

THIS ISSUE BRINGS together two poets we were thrilled to publish in the Women’s Review of Books, and they couldn’t be more different. Linda Bamber infuses her poems with a Buddhist sense of detachment—or rather, the hope of detachment, which life so often defeats. In “Nirvana,” she’s embroiled in the

I’ve been reading and loving Marilyn Hacker’s poetry ever since her first book, Presentation Piece (1974), which means just about my entire adult life. I can’t think of another poet who combines so many opposites: she’s a swashbuckling formalist, a love poet who’s obsessed with politics, a Francophile (she’s lived