Culture
New Poetry Books That Lean Into Calm and Joy Amid Life’s Chaos
Kuusisto, who teaches at Syracuse University, often takes his cues from Finland, where he spent a year in his childhood and whose poets he’s translated elsewhere (he quotes them here). A memoirist and essayist as well as a poet, Kuusisto has received acclaim for writing about his blindness, as in his 2018 book “Have Dog, Will Travel.” It’s a topic here too, one his verse will not let us forget, though he rarely makes it his only point. His well-traveled life, and his reliance on senses other than sight, suffuse the quiet scenes the new poems construct, outdoors in the snow, “beside the abandoned woodstove,” or indoors under the spell of poetry, another “game best played on the floor,” where “puzzle wish fear and ache/Are what a magician is for.”
by Andrea Ballou
The single lines and isolate sentences in Ballou’s OTHER TIMES, MIDNIGHT (Persea, paperback, $17) look stranded in more ways than one: They follow folk tales’ laments for missing husbands; grief for a lost child; the day-to-day bewilderments of an introvert in a hurried and crowded world; and the poor fit between the supposed wisdom of myth and the hard frustrations of family life.
In a motel, “a soul cries out to me … says it wants to live. Leave. I can’t tell which.” A dreamed, retold fairy tale finds Ballou “contemplating a vast wall of ovens” beside her dog, then morphing into molten salt: Hansel and Gretel meet Lot’s wife. That’s how she looks when she travels — but home fares no better. “Everyone in my house has a ripped face./My job is to re-upholster them.”
The Massachusetts-based Ballou looks back to the past, to other times and other souls, in search of advice, and finds only more challenges: Her stripped-down free verse (think Louise Glück meets Dana Levin) seems always in search of unobtainable answers — perhaps “an ice-age word, or pre-Columbian,/something with feathers on it.” The poetry, as she knows, comes from the looking, from the moving on, “the work of living in the arch itself,” the gateway to some afterlife we can never explore. Decades of writing (and a background in Spanish-language literature) have gone into this laconic and wise first book, where long-delayed second thoughts, long-awaited romance and long-term mourning become the enduring subjects: “Remorse docked her boat,” as Ballou writes, “long ago on my shore.”
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
-
Oregon4 minutes agoPGE requests large rate increase for Oregon data centers
-
Pennsylvania7 minutes agoPennsylvania’s beloved 100-year-old amusement park still refuses to charge admission
-
Rhode Island12 minutes agoR.I. Senate passes pair of DiPalma bills on dementia services and pension revocation for sex crimes – What’s Up Newp
-
South-Carolina19 minutes agoSouth Carolina Lottery Pick 3, Pick 4 results for June 4, 2026
-
South Dakota22 minutes ago
SD Lottery Millionaire for Life winning numbers for June 4, 2026
-
Tennessee27 minutes agoKnox County school board urges lawmakers to change Tennessee’s book ban law
-
Texas34 minutes agoWeekend Check: 6 things to do in Central Texas this weekend
-
Utah37 minutes agoUtah mother charged in connection with toddler’s 2019 death
