Ange Mlinko is poetry editor of The Nation and the author of Marvelous Things Overheard (FSG). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award for criticism, and teaches ...

The American poet Ange Mlinko’s fifth book is “Distant Mandate” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her title, borrowing a phrase from the writer László Krasznahorkai, refers to art’s primum mobile, its ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? We are pleased to report that the Poetry Foundation announced today that ...

It’s an adulterer’s town, you see,with warrens – if not warrants –everywhere … stairs to a conspiracyof fountains foiling the hearing(while raking in the ...

Adrienne Rich’s poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist (dating from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they ...

Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise ...

I like – don’t you? – that it has an insect tattooedin its sanctum sanctorum, a suitor’s pseud.That’s one aspect of its ghostliness, its moon-tones,its utter prescience, not to mention cojones.For if ...

Now you see, Urania, where the amphitheatre was.They built it, like the ancient Greeks, all open plan.Provisioned with natural acoustics, the space betweenthe two largest outcrops accommodates a crowd ...

Lydia Davis is big on lists. In her early short story ‘Break It Down’, the unnamed narrator attempts to balance financial and emotional ledgers in the aftermath of a love affair: I’m breaking it all ...