A.O. Scott on the Joy of Close Reading Poetry

Keza MacDonald, the video games editor at The Guardian and author of the new book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play,” chose to write her first book about Nintendo because it has been so central for so long to the culture of games. “It was ...  Show more

Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”How did we get here, with five young sisters living in 1700s England being hunted by an angry mob that su ...  Show more

Wonder and strangeness commingle with the commonplace and universal in Danielle Chapman’s “Trespassing with Tweens.” In a not-quite mirroring, a human mother and her children stand and watch together in awe as a great blue heron flaps in and feeds its two offspring. The pleasures ...  Show more

Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! After taking a look at Emily Dickinson's Poem #1 94 ("Title divine - is mine!"), Jacke talks to Cambridge University's Jess Cotton, whose biography of John Ashbery (John Ashbery: A Critical Life) charts Ashbery's rise from a minor avant-garde figure to the ...  Show more

Sasha Debevec-McKenney joins Kevin Young to read “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern,” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and her own poem “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/2 ...

A haunting, haunted poem for us today: Beci Carver joins the podcast to discuss Thomas Hardy's poem for his late wife, "The Voice."Beci is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at University of Exeter and the author of Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). Her articles have appea ...  Show more