Recent Entries:

In “The Moon in the Water,” a poem in Don Bogen’s third book Luster (2003), an actor playing Tarzan “jogging half-naked through the arboretum / is the relic of an Olympic swimming star.” The speaker holds himself above “the soggy domestic comedy of a jungle bungalow” played out by Tarzan, Jane and Boy.

The narrator of this tale is a former master chef who lives in his run-down failed inn. The time is the present. Don Juan appears suddenly, hurtling over his garden wall, pursued by a couple on a motorcycle.

Weapons Grade, poems by Terese Svoboda (University of Arkansas Press)

For the third springtime, I’ve invited poets to tell us about their favorite new books of poetry. This year they picked titles by Richard Jackson, Ted Mathys, Hillel Halkin, Beth Bachmann, Dora Malech, Valzhyna Mort, D.A.

Radim Kralik, the owner of Grapo Technologies, a Czech company producing wide format printers, lives in a 3,660-foot modernistic concrete box atop a converted grain silo in Olomouc, about 175 miles east of Prague.

When René Char died in 1988 at the age of 80, President Jacques Chirac called him “the greatest French poet of the twentieth century.” The writer Françoise Giraud remarked that Chirac “would read poetry behind a copy of Playboy” presumably to preserve his reputation as a seducer, but it’s more likely that Chirac encouraged the anecdote.