Jim Kates
Some of the jokes in “2 Pianos 4 Hands” reach fairly deep into an understanding of how classical music works and is taught; other jokes will be recognizable to anyone who has taken piano lessons or raised a child to do so.
Read More“Say Goodnight Gracie” revels in familiarity and age. It travels on creaky wheels of recognition rather than on rockets of revelation.
Read MoreThis anthology, made up of Michael Wolfe’s superb translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, begins in prehistory and ends in the sixth century C.E.
Read MorePoet Mikhail Kuzmin, born in the 1870s into a family of Russian Old Believers, was a passionate exponent of gay literature in the early twentieth century.
Read More“Henrik Nordbrandt now holds a unique place in his homeland as its most celebrated national poet, who happens to have spent most of his adult life outside Denmark.”
Read MoreConsider these few notes my handing The Porcupine of Mind off to you — you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.
Read MoreIn 1853, the Czech scholar Karol Jaromír Erben published “A Bouquet of Folk Tales,” which became a source-book for artists and composers, and “one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature.”
Read MoreYvan Goll may be the great shape-shifter, the Zelig, of twentieth-century poetry.
Read More“Rounding Third” flounders most when it tries to get serious. Luckily, it doesn’t try very hard, and delivers considerable amusement.
Read MoreIf the poems in “That Said: New and Selected Poems” had been ordered differently, the volume would have made more of its virtues.
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else