January 2, 2026 Poetry “Gaza—the stadium of the soul” and Other Poems By The Paris Review NIGHTFALL (AFTER ASIMOV AND EMERSON) (4), 2017, CYANOTYPE EXPOSED BY STARLIGHT ON FOUND BOOK PAGE, 9 1/10 X 5 9/10 IN. COURTESY OF ALA EBTEKAR AND THE THIRD LINE. FROM OUR WINTER 2024 ISSUE. “I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief,” Alice Oswald told Rachael Allen in our Art of Poetry interview in the new Winter issue. Oswald had decided to join more than five hundred protesters in London’s Parliament Square in August in support of Palestine Action, which the British government had designated a terrorist group. British police arrested Oswald, as she had expected and planned for, though her only previous interaction with the law had been “occasionally break[ing] the speed limit.” At the time, Oswald was mentoring young Palestinian poets through the Hands Up Project, a charity set up by Nick Bilbrough. Being involved in these young poets’ lives, Oswald said, made it impossible not to act. She worked with five others—two of whom worked with students in Arabic and three of whom helped them write in English—to mentor thirteen teenage students. “Some students had already been evacuated to Cairo, some were in the West Bank; others were surviving in tents or half ruined buildings in Gaza,” she told us in an email. “There were times when hunger, bereavement, displacement or lack of internet made it impossible to meet up. On these occasions, mentors exchanged poems intermittently through WhatsApp or voice messages.” Still, they tried to get together as a group at least once a month, and shared a Google Doc of their poems so they could read each other’s work. Rebecca Ruth Gould, a professor at SOAS University of London, invited the Hands Up Project to collaborate on a book called From Dust We Rise: New Poetry from Palestine, which collects the work of these Palestinian poets. The Review is publishing several of their poems here. These poems, Oswald said, are “an astonishing record not only of the darkness we have all been through, but also of human dignity, courage, patience, and recovery.” Gaza—the stadium of the soul by Bassim Helmi Hijazi (twenty years old) On a land choked with blood, there lies a field with no green grass its soil the ashes of shattered homes. The touchlines are not drawn in white chalk but in the tears of mothers. The two goalposts, a child who lost his arms and a father searching for the scent of his child beneath the stones. Read More
September 23, 2025 Poetry Party in the USA By Patricia Lockwood FROM JOSH SMITH’S DINOSAURS, A PORTFOLIO THAT APPEARED IN THE WINTER 2024 ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW. ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY FARZAD OWRANG, COURTESY OF JOSH SMITH. After a while English departs and you Find yourself in a realm. Like the Wild Boy Reaching for a potato in the mirror. Someone was holding it behind his head. He never stopped to let it cool but made Little cries to indicate it was burning him. Still, it was his favorite food. After an hour Of reading out loud your carefulness Is mere sound, the city you have built Whistles. Between chapters I wrapped up And shivered, did not eat, so I could go on Speaking what seemed the whole language At once: tongue twisters, all observation. “Party in the U.S.A.” was recorded in that booth, Her platinum record hung on the wall. Active shooter in my building, Mary texted, Just as we broke to stretch. Fucking America, We said, and settled in to read the father Chapter. The Wild Boy would be cared for By a priest, later, but first, a school Gardener. Scenery on the way to Paris Did not impress him, he caught a light Case of smallpox, and insisted on having His potato next to him at all times. There are feats that seem impossible Just before and after: 8,000 signatures, Being alive. You cannot think about page Numbers, your hunger, or Baby Peck, Hysterical, trying to climb into your sister’s Desk with a bottle of bourbon, to hide. They are locked down, quiet, texting. Why had it felt so urgent to be heard? Hold on, baby, I said, and Paul: “I once had an RPG shot at me While dancing to ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ ” We waited for word: OK, they got him. And waited for word: I hate it here. “The boy had grown quite fat now, Loved to be tickled, laughed easily, And apparently dreamed while asleep.” They were saddened that he cared only For his own survival, nourishment. You could not die with your potato Next to you, a potato meant one more day. Little clouds breathed out—cry cry!— And there were jagged peaks. Oh, it was all painful, mealy, wonderful. How it contained—hot hot!—all Custom, rivers of butter, green chives Of trees, a gardener who had promised Him a new home if he ever needed one. Patricia Lockwood is the author of five books, including the novel Will There Ever Be Another You.
July 3, 2024 Poetry Rorschach By Diana Garza Islas Rorschach plate that originally appeared in Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach (1921). Public domain. Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen. Two cartoon Polish men high-five. Their legs and their heads are red, to accentuate the fact that their heads are like socks. Their eyes are like their mouths, almost smiling at their mischief. They betray a body pact. Two bald women with upturned noses, alien eyes, and prominent oval breasts. The separation between torso and hip through a knee and high heels propping up either two gardeners watering or two amphibians. On either side, fetuses in placenta or ghosts with their fingers to their lips, and with ribbons, evidently red, around their necks. Read More
February 21, 2024 Poetry Stopping Dead from the Neck Up By Delmore Schwartz Gustav Klimt, Tannenwald, 1901. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising short story writer and poet in the generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor at the Partisan Review, he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems and letters were published in the Review in the eighties and nineties.) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the fact that Schwartz’s later years were characterized by mental illness and alcoholism. He died, largely isolated, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966. Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know. I bought it several weeks ago. It stands there stolid on the shelf Making me feel lower than low Reminding me how I am low, Making me think of Crane and Poe. My fatlipped mouth must think it queer To stop without a single beer, To stop without a single beer The deadest day I ever spent In boredom and in self-contempt, Sober, sour, discontent. My fingers have begun to shake, My nerves think there is some mistake. The only other thought I think. Is how I failed to be a rake, A story which should take the cake. The booze stares at me like a brink. But I must wait for five, I think. Long hours must pass, before I drink; Long hours and slow, before I drink. The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.
August 8, 2023 Poetry Watch Jessica Laser Read “Kings” at the Paris Review Offices By The Paris Review On August 3, the poet Jessica Laser visited the offices of the Review in Chelsea and treated us to a reading of her poem “Kings,” which appears in our Summer issue. The poem, which our poetry editor Srikanth Reddy described as a “dreamy, autobiographical remembrance,” includes memories of a drinking game she used to play in high school on Lake Michigan, and is charged with eros: … You never knew whether it would be strip or not, so you always considered wearing layers. It was summer. Sometimes you’d get pretty naked but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off one sock at a time. A perfect poem to read or listen to in the dog days of August, as summer flings might be coming to an end! Read More
May 16, 2023 Poetry Primrose for X By Fanny Howe London buses moving. Licensed under CCO 2.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet’s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called Himmelschlüsselchen). For herbalists it is a sedative, pain reliever, and salve. It keeps depression at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Eating one can manifest fairies. In Albion it is among the first blooms of spring. The “rathe Primrose” is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the “laureate hearse” of Lycidas. “Primrose for X” opens with Fanny Howe “tracking Blake on Primrose Hill” and twelve quatrains later ends with her on a high-speed train that “raced away from London / and Blake’s theophanies.” What she finds in the lyric interim are no golden pillars of Jerusalem or celebrity sets. No St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf highlight the skyline as they do for visitors in relief on the metal panoramic sign at 66.7 meters high. Here the “unsteady skyline” is “like a graph that measures / markets, snails and heartbeats”—one of many instances in Fanny Howe’s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world around us, as if these comparative truths always existed as air to breathe. Meanings break free with snails and “shucked” at the end of the line that contrasts the brain with the “slippery” heart that also slips across the stanza. And how the vital heart monitor beats with the little line’s cadence “How am I still here / at every thump?”—the question posed to herself or Thou of her own life’s longevity answered by the steady pulse of spirit-touched heart, along with doubt’s silence. Read More