Few poets are as plain as Cesare Pavese—and few as difficult to carry from Italian into English. His poems march with prosaic clarity, yet beneath them runs a pulse of reflection on history and culture, transfigured into allegory. To read him is to be lulled by apparent simplicity, only to feel tremors beneath each line.

The chapbook Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England—by Danielle Legros Georges, former poet laureate of Boston . . . —is set in a time of revolution, harnessing from that era a spirit of lightness while speaking, as the title says, of Africans’ resistance.

Being the natural child of Sylvia Plath and William Blake (with an incurable weakness for on-page dramatics), I was not a natural reader for the work of Arthur Sze, as I first encountered it in the mid 1990s.

Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry is not an easy, elegant read: trauma, prisons, torture, murders, and arresting phrases like “rotten carcass economy” and “the blankest of times” recur ad nauseam.

It was in one of our long-ago conversations that I first heard about Joan Wickersham’s immersion in what she called her Vasa project, a most unlikely-sounding undertaking . . .

Under the stewardship of Reviews Editor Rachel Mennies, we’re looking for roughly 1,500-to-3,000-word review essays that lift us to your singular inquiry-driven vantage: show us what your chosen book reveals to you that only you can show. Begin new conversations; bring us along for your investigations...