Reading

Robyn Schiff’s work has long demonstrated that American poetry can be both ornamental and discursive, both formally inventive and intimate. But the intimacy, in her latest, is woven more explicitly—and even more movingly—into the history and science that have long been the stuff of her métier. Information Desk is described as an epic. It takes its name from the station in the center of the great hall in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a literal desk that, across Schiff’s layered and teeming lines, becomes a metaphor for the Western mind itself. So as the book takes us through the museum—the book is a work of ekphrasis that contains, like nested dolls, poems about art within a poem about art—it also becomes a poem about our moment, about how we got here, about how we grew up into the disturbed and doomsday realms of our present reality. The book does all this by way of three larger, longer poems—sections?—made up, mostly, of six-line stanzas that seem always on the verge of crumbling: their architecture is both strict and fickle, willing to shift as the feeling shifts.

Knocked Up
Rosemary’s Baby

He’s Just Not That Into You
Saw

“That England that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself” – William Shakespeare, ‘Richard II’    The making of the Black working class in Britain was a long process reflecting essential changes in Britain’s labour needs over time, both at home and abroad. Difference has always been a feature of […]

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Indian author and journalist Pankaj Mishra helps explain the new era of crisis that the world is entering upon.

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