October 8, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Natalie Shapero on “The Top of Hell” By Natalie Shapero Photography courtesy of Natalie Shapero. Natalie Shapero’s poem “The Top of Hell,” which appears in our new Fall issue, no. 257, is nominally about the top of Hell, but it is also implicitly about the bottom, the background bits that its inhabitants don’t see. “It’s weird that Hades, when he dropped,” she writes, “dropped only to the top of Hell. That he didn’t / plunge all the way down.” This is also, more or less, the basic impulse behind our series Making of a Poem, where we ask poets to lift the hood on a poem they’ve contributed to our pages. In this installment, Shapero talks about some of the unseen parts of her process, from watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to “the physical properties of Hell.” How did “The Top of Hell” start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Greek mythology does not appear frequently in my writing—usually, I don’t think about it at all. But there was a concentrated period in my life when it was very much on my mind. This was last year, when I was preparing to be a contestant on Jeopardy! Read More
October 7, 2026 On Poetry Prynne’s Last Poem By Ryan Ruby Single Tangle Mine (2026) by J. H. Prynne, Face Press. Courtesy of Ian Heames. Whenever I find myself in London, the first thing I do is go to the London Review Bookshop, down the street from the British Museum in Bloomsbury. I ask a bookseller to take me to the basement floor and open the supply closet. There, along with the shop’s buckets and mops and other cleaning supplies, are two shelves containing the latest sequences by the poet J. H. Prynne (1936–2026). Released in limited editions with print runs of between a hundred and two hundred and fifty copies by small presses in Cambridge, these beautifully designed and sometimes miniature chapbooks are kept in the supply closet in order, I assume, to prevent theft. I must have visited it half a dozen times since 2016, when Prynne was first recommended to me by a friend as a way of getting out of a particularly interminable reading slump. Read More
July 14, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Zain Baweja on “Gloss” By Zain Baweja Scan of Zain Baweja’s notebook. In our series Making of a Poem, we ask poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Zain Baweja’s “Gloss,” which appears in our Summer issue, no. 256, plays with the etymological lineage and various translations of the word gul, or “rose,” across Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and English, among others. Our editorial intern James Langan, who pored over many archaic dictionaries to fact-check Baweja’s poem, spoke with him for this installment. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I don’t know when my fascination with the word gul began. I kept encountering novel uses of it in my readings of Urdu and Persian literature. In the Indo-Persian epic Dastan-e-amir hamza, for instance, there is a passage that uses the phrase gul khana (“to eat roses”) as the term for scarring oneself. It turns out, according to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, that it was once a custom for lovers to burn themselves with a hot iron to prove their intense passion; it was also customary to treat “madness” with cauterization. A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884) by John T. Platts. Scan of page 911, via Internet Archive. These archaic uses led me to bilingual dictionaries, like John Thompson Platts’s A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English and Francis Joseph Steingass’s A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. In both texts, each entry is formatted as one dense and continuous paragraph. Multiscript headwords, definitions, idioms, and compound phrases are all crammed together into a single block of text, separated only by semicolons and em dashes. I felt a peculiar shock when reading these entries, which gather usages that traverse centuries and geographical regions and place them side by side. It is the sort of temporal compression found in a poem, and it attuned me to the mutability of words I thought I knew. I started collecting all the definitions of the word gul I could find. I wrote down entries from Platts and Steingass as well as colloquial uses from my own memory. My notes began to look like a glossary for some absent text. I decided to retain that indexical structure as a poetic form. Read More
June 17, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Hannah Piette on “Nijinsky Dancing” By Hannah Piette Nijinski Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein. All photographs courtesy of Hannah Piette. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, she dissects “Nijinsky Dancing.” How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I was tasked in a drawing class to draw a figure in space. I knew at once where to find the figure—in my giant, golden book Nijinsky Dancing. Although we cannot watch videos of Nijinsky dancing, the book assembles a photographic record of his motions. I was taking adult-beginner ballet classes and reading the New York School poet and dance critic Edwin Denby’s writings on dance. In his essay “Notes on Nijinsky Photographs,” he observes Nijinsky’s technique only through photographs and writes that Nijinsky discovered how to control the “variability” of a face, as his face transforms from role to role. I chose a photograph of him leaping, in the costume of a prince. It was one of my first drawings of a person. I couldn’t get his face right. I kept erasing it and drawing new faces over the half-erased marks. He looked askew, covered in charcoal smudges. It wasn’t the single photograph that was the beginning of this poem, but the shifts between his figures across the photographs and the shifts between his faces and the erased faces I drew. In his roles, Nijinsky “disappears completely,” Denby writes, and remains “detached” from the imaginary characters that take his place, and who exist “independently of himself, in the objective world.” I wanted to write a poem that would work toward this technique. Was it possible to write a poem in which my face completely disappeared? Read More
June 11, 2026 On Poetry What Is Poetry? Chelsey Minnis’s Frying Pan Full of Diamonds By Jordan Castro Seth Lemmons, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Early on in Opera Fever, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: “Is this a poem or the back of a shovel?”—something that can literally take off the back of your head. This January, I read a dozen or so noir novels from the thirties and forties. People were smothered with towels, bludgeoned in bathtubs, beaten to death with glass decanters, and killed by stray bullets at dance marathons. Some weeks, I watched a noir film every night. I watched YouTube videos about noir. Noir, one video explained, was a reaction to the Depression and the war: it gave form to a cynical vision of American life, depicting an amoral and violent world that many had come to think of as the dark reality underlying ordinary experience. The darkness feels revelatory and “real,” yet this effect was achieved through surreal German Expressionist-influenced artifice. Noir is highly stylized—chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets, hard-boiled speech—and yet it is one of the twentieth century’s great visual languages for representing “reality.” When I first became interested in literature at fourteen, I was obsessed with realism in the form of “authenticity.” Writing, I thought, was self-expression. The more “honest” it was—and the more devoid of “unnecessary” flourish—the better. I liked Kmart realism and so-called alt-lit, in which authors expressed their bleak worldviews simply, in a seemingly unmediated manner. I listened to rap music, where being “real” was the archvirtue. But the older I got, the more “realness” as an aesthetic value felt pale and inadequate, if not deluded and impossible. Art that had once seemed to me, naively, to express real life, increasingly felt like an elaborate construction that used “authenticity” as a kind of crutch. Every so-called realism implicitly made claims about what counted as real, and what didn’t. But more obviously artificial modes know what noir’s aestheticized “realism” inadvertently shows: that the world isn’t simply there, but stylized into visibility. Read More
May 21, 2026 On Poetry Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota By Thomas John Weber Pine Island, 2026. Photograph by Thomas John Weber. Pine Island, despite its name, is not an island. It’s your average Midwestern farm town, population 3,800. Highway 52 cuts through it like a spine, with little to see on either side except corn and billboards—unless it’s winter, in which case it’s just billboards. Most advertise burgers or death: McDonald’s (seven miles north), Newt’s Burgers (thirteen miles south), judgment day (“After You Die, You Will Meet God”), plus two competing southeast Minnesota cremation services. Only one billboard, on the south end, is locally relevant. It’s newer, smaller, and appears to be homemade. It reads: NO DATA CENTER. Read More