3/3
As with any effective narrative poem, Gothic verse narratives utilize the expediencies afforded by lines and stanzas as opposed to prose paragraphs—an advantage that allows for ready access to the imagination, the expressive immediacy of prosody, and the trance-like cadences of meter.
2/3
By threatening to negate the social, aesthetic, physical, and historical forces that determine such limits, Gothic provides a vehicle for testing the legitimacy of authority and norms. Verse narratives heighten this tension by further frustrating expectations about genre and form.
Brian Brodeur reflects on contemporary Gothic verse narratives:
1/3
Readers unfamiliar with this tradition might wonder why poets turn to Gothic. Predicated on limit and transgression, this genre strains against the constraints of plausibility.
2/2
Image: Lisa Corinne Davis, Convulsive Calculation, 2025. Oil on canvas, 72 x 100 in., 182.9 x 254 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery.
Karen Wilkin on “Lisa Corinne Davis: Syllogism” at Miles McEnery:
1/2
Davis displayed her usual virtuosity in juggling layers of sharp-edged floating shapes—mostly small rectangles—keeping them aloft by means of intense, often strongly contrasting color…each canvas was surprising and unpredictable.
A mesmerizing novel by Vigdis Hjorth…Every moment conveys a sense of firstness…Violence lurks in this searing retrospective. I read Repetition in a single night.
—Cary Holladay reviews Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund @versobooks.bsky.social hudsonreview.com/2026/02/witc...
3/3
Heaney’s poetry reminds us that there is life in our language yet, as it continues to change in the vital speech of succeeding generations.
2/3
It is a new and more textured language, a dialect of poetry which was always potential, not unrefined but refined anew. This is both translation and transformation.
Mark Jarman on Seamus Heaney’s collected poems, ed. by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue, & Matthew Hollis @fsgbooks.bsky.social
1/3
One of Heaney’s tasks has been...to show the English how their language can sound in the speech of those they have tried unsuccessfully to make one of them.
4/4
Images:
Ashley Hod and Jules Mabie in The Goldberg Variations, choreography by Jerome Robbins, New York City Ballet. Credit Photo: Erin Baiano.
Christina Clark and Alec Knight, The Goldberg Variations, choreography by Jerome Robbins, New York City Ballet. Credit Photo: Erin Baiano.
3/4
By the end, as the original theme returns, you are left with the feeling of having experienced a great arc, a fully realized idea explored in all its possibilities and permutations. It is, I think, a great work.
2/4
the individual qualities of its dancers as well as the relationships between them. Its power, like that of Bach’s series of variations, accumulates slowly, moment by moment.
Marina Harss reviews Jerome Robbins’ Goldberg Variations, @nycballet.bsky.social:
1/4
Goldberg Variations has quietly re-entered the building. I watched it twice last season, struck each time not only by its tranquil mastery and deep musical understanding, but also by the way it shows the company,
Our winter issue (& new website!!!) is now online! Featuring fiction by Leslie Pietrzyk, nonfiction by Brian Brodeur, poetry by Natania Rosenfeld, reviews by Marina Harss, Karen Wilkin, Brooke Allen & Mark Jarman, a letter from London by James Campbell, & more! hudsonreview.com
“1. So Busy
I wonder what my left brain has been up to
During all these years of virtual silence…”
Read Marilyn Nelson’s poem “Eleven Lebens,” published in @hudsonreview.bsky.social & featured in our #BlackHistoryMonth reading list: hudsonreview.com/2025/10/elev...
“First came the drama, meeting the man who would become the baby’s father. On her way back to the dorm room from seeing the movie Body Snatchers…”
Read Reyumeh Ejue’s “Full Term” in @hudsonreview.bsky.social! #BlackHistoryMonth hudsonreview.com/2025/02/full...
Image: Roman Mejia with cellist Hannah Holman in Jerome Robbins’ A Suite of Dances. Photo credit: Erin Baiano.
[Roman] Mejia’s youthful hunger for movement makes the audience buzz—and what a jump! He emanates a giddy joy…Dancers like these make us eager to go to the ballet.
—Marina Harss reviews Roman Mejia in Jerome Robbins’ A Suite of Dances, NYC Ballet.
The pleasures of Martin enfold and are enfolded by an epicurean’s comprehension of life’s brevity and richness.
—Mark Jarman reviews The Khayyam Suite by Charles Martin @hopkinspress.bsky.social hudsonreview.com/2025/10/livi...
2/2
After such brutal practices, how brief,
How frail and unambitious a belief
To cling to when the breath of life departs,
Or answer for the tearing out of hearts.
From “The Life to Come” by Stephen Edgar:
1/2
...At death,
The Aztecs thought the human soul, as I
Have somewhere read, becomes a butterfly,
Or dwells in one, but cannot long delay
Its dissolution, and soon drains away.
I can imagine Whitman writing with this warmth of human connection and Hart Crane slipping into the skin of each passenger via his exotic inventions of language...this new poet, new to me at least, rubs elbows with them.
—Mark Jarman on No Known Coordinates by Maria Terrone from The Word Works
Gary Shteyngart outdoes himself with Vera, or Faith...This is What Maisie Knew for contemporary readers who would rather laugh than cry as our country becomes increasingly authoritarian and racist.
—Susan Balée on Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart from Random House hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...
2/2
I imagine feeling flush with feeling.
Sea, where a sea was never meant to be.
Depth, where there is not depth. The mind unpieced,
Becoming, of a sudden, one again.
From “Sonnet” by Dylan Carpenter:
1/2
I am beside myself, being always here
And never somewhere else. The way I am
Like a stone scraped against a stone and placed
Beside that stone...I am not who I am.
2/2
But beauty is always new, never old. Cycladic sculpture is beautiful because it looks absolutely modern, not 4,000 years old. The merely archaic in literature lies dead on the page.
Bruce Whiteman on Homer’s Iliad, trans. by Jeffrey M. Duban from Clairview Books:
1/2
Duban has striven to create an Iliad “new by virtue of its datedness,” but that was an unrealizable goal....Duban claims quite correctly that a translation can be “at once faithful and beautiful.”
