“I like to think you gave us extraordinary power,” Lucille Clifton writes in a poem dedicated to her great-grandmother. “You are the arrow that pierced our plain skin and made us fancy women.” How ...

Poetry has two kinds of music. There is the sound it makes when read aloud, and then it has an inner composition, too -- that strange, occult rhythm verses make when your mind, not your lips, mouths ...

Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read. A ...