Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (Holzfällen. Eine Erregung, 1984) places an unnamed writer inside a Viennese “artistic dinner” and turns one evening into a sustained examination of friendship, resentment, cultural ambition and self-implication. The narrator spends much...
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, published in 1864, places a fiercely self-conscious narrator inside an argument about freedom, reason, humiliation and the human desire to resist any system that claims to explain conduct completely. The unnamed Underground...
Contemporary poetry describes poetry shaped by the literary, social and formal conditions of the recent past and present. It includes free verse and inherited forms, poems written for the page and for performance, documentary and hybrid work, lyric sequences, prose...
Female poets have shaped lyric voice, poetic form, public speech, confessional writing, modernist experiment, Black literary traditions, queer poetics, nature poetry and contemporary American verse across more than two millennia. The twelve poets in this guide offer...
Funny poems make rhythm, rhyme, voice and surprise work together. A comic poem may tell an absurd story, build a perfect pattern and break it at the decisive moment, imitate serious language for ridiculous purposes, or compress an entire joke into a few lines. The...
