Half my friends are dead. I will make you new ones, said earth. No, give me them back, as they were, instead, with faults and all, I cried. Tonight I can snatch their talk from the faint surf's drone through the canes, but I cannot walk on the moonlit leaves of...

It’s his vision of this piss-colored parchment. With griffins cinched near the edges of the frame. As Africa, newly rivered, sits mysterious as the brain Of his New World, its synopsis as curt as Enjambment. Its proposed longitudes and latitudes Meeting mid-ocean and forming warped crosses Wrapping around the water...

We are all going into a world of dark. And that’s okay, Given the wing-wrung alternative. It’s okay. That’s where the secrets are, The big ones, the ones too tall to tell. The way in is twisty and torturous, but easy, they say, easy. The way out, however, is unavailable, and...

A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— rose in the mate’s binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island’s still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through...

I think of you here because I thought of you here before. Otherwise I never think of you except on a summer drive that echoes the drive I took the day after I heard you died except when I see the red skirt I wore that day the day you finally kissed me a red skirt I now...

There is a hornet in the room and one of us will have to go out the window into the late August midafternoon sun. I won. There is a certain challenge in being humane to hornets but not much. A launch draws two lines of wake behind it on the bay like...

May marks the end of Poetry Month, 2015. We had a wonderful run, celebrating with a number of essays, profiles, and, yes, poems. They include a brilliantly insightful essay by Rowan Ricardo Phillips on the genius of Charles Wright, a cunningly bizarre...

Louise Glück is a master at writing about our human impermanence with all the sensitivity, precision, grace, and rage that such a subject demands: "It grieves me to think / the dead won’t see them— / these things we depend on, / they disappear." —Laura...

The Road to Emmaus is a wonderful book, one of my favorites in contemporary poetry. Reece is both questioning and devotional, his poems are full of pain, wonder, and jolting imagery. The book contains several long poems I love—“1 Corinthians 13” is a...

Charles Wright. The poet between now and not-now; between know and not-know; between the sun’s fire and a mountain’s snow; the poet between Dante and dude. He says he wished for anonymity—not for his poems but for Charles Wright: an anonymous author of astonishing poems—yet...

I wouldn’t want to bill anything as “my favorite FSG poem,” but I can say that the FSG poem I have reread most often in the past couple of years is Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings,” though I can’t even really say why except...

This poem is a great reminder of how precious life is. As Neruda writes, “joy in all things, in what falls and what flourishes.” Enjoy life, appreciate its beauty, and know that it takes just one moment for everything to change. —Vicki Genna How much happens...