Journal articles
”Please, Please, Please: The Mourned Musician in Recent American Poetry.” Post45, forthcoming. Honorable Mention for the Mary Esteve Emerging Scholar Essay Prize.
“Sidewise Looks: Asian American Poets Revisit Wallace Stevens.” ELH 91, no. 2 (Summer 2024), 565–597.
“George Oppen’s Now: Lyric Immediacy in ‘Psalm.’” Semicerchio 65, “Light and Rust: Poetry about Communist Society” special issue, edited by Antonella Francini (2021): 79–83.
“What We Said of It: The Generational ‘We’ in Stevens and Ashbery.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 45, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 229–250. Part of “Special Section: A Forum on Stevens and Lyric Theory,” edited by Henry Weinfield, with an introduction by Weinfield, 195–198.
“You Can Never Be Sure.” American Literary History Forum, 2 September 2021, 1–18. Reprinted in American Literary History 35, no. 4 (Winter 2023): 1825–1842. (On The Selected Letters of John Berryman, edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, and Berryman’s influence today.)
“Thick as Thebes: Orientalist Style in James Merrill’s Divine Comedies.” Contemporary Literature 61, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 221–257.
“A Delicate, Vibrating Range of Difference: Adrienne Rich and the Postwar Lyric ‘We.’” College Literature 47, no. 1, “Poetry Networks” special issue, edited by Kamran Javadizadeh and Robert Volpicelli (Winter 2020): 89–124.
“Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s Response-Poems and the African American Lyric ‘We.’” The Cambridge Quarterly 48, no. 3 (September 2019): 231–257. Part of “Poetry’s ‘We’: A Symposium,” with a response by Bonnie Costello, “Poetry’s We: A Response,” 258–268.
Essays and reviews
Remembrance of Helen Vendler in “As You Leave the Room: A Memorial Tribute: Marjorie Perloff & Helen Vendler.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 48, no. 2 (Fall 2024): 285–288.
“Peter Sacks.” Lana Turner 16 (2024): 266–272.
“Extended Play: An EP for Garrett Hongo.” The Sewanee Review 131, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 330–351. (Lecture for the 2022 Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, awarded to Garrett Hongo.)
Reviews for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books blog: Will Harris’s Brother Poem, February 2023; Rob Schlegel’s Childcare, Evie Shockley’s suddenly we, Mag Gabbert’s Sex Depression Animals, Brandon Som’s Tripas, March 2023; Elizabeth Metzger’s Lying In, Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground, Kyle Dargan’s Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky’s In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, April 2023; Randall Mann’s Deal: New and Selected Poems, Ronald Johnson’s Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, Natalie Eilbert’s Overland, and Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [åmot], May 2023; Timothy Donnelly’s Chariot, A. Van Jordan’s When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger, Phuong T. Vuong’s A Plucked Zither, June 2023; Joey Connolly’s The Recycling, Lakdhas Wikkramasinha’s Lakdhas Wikkramasinha edited by Aparna Halpé and Michael Ondaatje, July 2023; Gabriel Dozal’s The Border Simulator, Sally Wen Mao’s The Kingdom of Surfaces, August 2023; Jesse Nathan’s Eggtooth, Jasmine Gibson’s A Beauty Has Come, Leslie Sainz’s Have You Been Long Enough at Table, Jane Huffman’s Public Abstract, September 2023; Adrienne Chung’s Organs of Little Importance, Sahar Muradi’s Octobers, Ha Jaeyoun’s Radio Days, October 2023; Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems, Tacey M. Atsitty’s (At) Wrist, November 2023.
Contributor to “The Best Books of 2022,” The Boston Globe, 15 December 2022.
“‘Have You Thanked Your Executioner Today?: Three Reviews.” The Sewanee Review 130, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 543–565. (On Solmaz Sharif’s Customs, Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling, and Rachel Mannheimer’s Earth Room.)
“‘Read the City Walls for Signs of My Life’: Four Reviews.” The Sewanee Review 130, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 150–171. (On Maureen N. McLane’s More Anon: Selected Poems, Tongo Eisen-Martin’s Blood on the Fog, Wendy Xu’s The Past, and Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell.)
Contributor to “Best Books of 2021,” The Boston Globe, 9 December 2021.
“I Hope I Haven’t Bored You.” Poetry Foundation, 7 June 2021. (On A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser, and research at the James Merrill Papers at Washington University.)
“Ambivalent Forever Now: A Review of Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then.” The Adroit Review, 6 May 2021.
“Incalculable Loss.” The Yale Review 109, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 183–196. (On mourning in 2020, Victoria Chang’s Obit, Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Seeing the Body, and Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne.)
“Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘England in 1819.’” Poetry Foundation, 18 February 2020.
“Give Me More Time.” Poetry 214, no. 4 (July–August 2019): 371–386. (On Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, and Paige Lewis’s Space Struck.)
“A Ghost of Collectivity: Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death.” Denver Quarterly 53, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 106–112.
“I’m a Pencil Cat.” The Cambridge Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 2019): 84–89. (On Brent Hayes Edwards’s Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination and jazz and literary criticism today.)
“History Lessons: Evie Shockley’s semiautomatic and Ange Mlinko’s Distant Mandate.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 January 2019.
Review of Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead. The Yale Review 106, no. 4 (October 2018): 163–169.
Review of Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life. Chicago Review 61, no. 3 & 4 (Summer 2018): 207–211.
“The 100 Pages That Shaped Comics.” Vulture, 16 April 2018. [I wrote the entries on Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, and Bryan Lee O’Malley.]
“Cathy Park Hong: ‘Ballad in A.’” Poetry Foundation, 28 February 2018.
Review of Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers. Harvard Review Online, 22 February 2018.
Review of Frank Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. The Yale Review 106.1 (January 2018): 178–191.
Review of Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child. Chicago Review 60.4–61.1 (2017): 233–237.
“Showcase Showdown.” BOMB Daily, 3 July 2017. (On Adrienne Raphel’s What Was It For.)
“‘Master of None’ and Everyone.” Public Books, 9 June 2017. (On season two of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None.)
“The Fuzzy In-Betweenness of Everything.” Slate, 8 December 2016. (On Paul Muldoon’s Selected Poems 1968–2014.)
“The Improbable Life and Prescient Poetry of Basil Bunting.” New Yorker Page-Turner blog, 2 August 2016. (On Basil Bunting’s “Briggflatts” fifty years on, and The Poems of Basil Bunting, ed. Don Share.)
“Wear Your Wig.” Boston Review (May–June 2016): 62–64 .(On Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn.)
Review of David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong. Harvard Review Online, 29 April 2016.
“To Shoot Your Own Ghost.” The Oxonian Review 30 no. 2, 22 February 2016. (On Don Paterson, 40 Sonnets.)
“Ready to Sing: Angie Estes’s Enchantée.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 May 2015.
Book chapters
“Part Music Box, Part Meat Grinder: Contemporary Poets Play Back the Sonnet.” In Approaches to Teaching the Sonnet, edited by Joshua Reid. Modern Language Association of America, forthcoming.
“The Space of Public Memory: Monuments, Memorials, and American Poetry from ‘The New Colossus’ to Black Lives Matter.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900, edited by Daniel Morris, 16–35. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
“Music.” In Elizabeth Bishop in Context, edited by Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis, 233–244. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
“Community and Audience.” In The New Wallace Stevens Studies, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han, 44–57. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
“Documentary.” In Keywords in Comics Studies, edited by Ramzi Fawaz, Shelley Streeby, and Deborah Whaley, 80–84. NYU Press, 2021.
“Causes for Excess: Elizabeth Bishop’s Eighty-Eight Exclamations.” In Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature, edited by Angus Cleghorn, 51–63. Palgrave Pivot, 2019.
“Ready to Sing.” In The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes’s Poetry, edited by Doug Rutledge, 151–159. University of Michigan Press, 2019. (Expanded version of “Ready to Sing,” below.)
Misc.
“Christopher Spaide.” The Sewanee Review Podcast, 21 June 2023.
Discussion of Terrance Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel” with Kamran Javadizadeh for the podcast Close Readings, 13 February 2023.
Poetry Magazine Reading List: January 2020. (On Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Limón.)
Poetry Magazine Reading List: July/August 2019. (On Mark Alan Stamaty’s MacDoodle St. and Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets.)
The Common Friday Reads: October 2018. (On Marilyn Chin’s A Portrait of the Self as Nation.)
Poetry Magazine Reading List: January 2018. (On end-of-2017 reading.)