"It displayed hundreds of personal items: his collection of ties; letters to his mother, neatly stacked in a glass case, their contents protected from voyeuristic eyes; a minute Hitler figurine, which had belonged to Larkin’s father; the hard covers and spines of Larkin’s diaries, among them one decorated with collages of scantily dressed women cut out of magazines (the insides of those diaries, which he had entrusted to Monica Jones, his longtime companion, had been shredded shortly after his death)." Yiyun Li • New Yorker

"I’ve learnt, I think, that one of the secrets of Haitian existence is the joy of creativity and the joy of being creative through this danse de l’araignée – this joy of what Dénètem Touam Bona calls ‘l’indocilité du vivant’, the indomitableness of the creative instinct." Jason Allen-Paisant • Granta

"My first reading of Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations happened on a train stirring eastward through Pennsylvania on a day that was spring by calendar but not in sight, the fields still sere, the sunlight thin. In the quiet car, the living hum of bodies and tasks carried on around me, each of us experiencing a communal kind of solitude, while I sat in the deep winter of the collection’s second poem. Hathaway writes, “Yesterday the river ice, till now page-blank, was annotated / by coyotes. I followed their new year letters down along the / west side of the island[.]”" Holly M. Wendt • Ploughshares

"W. B. Yeats was surely wrong when he wrote that “[w]e make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” This suggests that poetry, in its essence, has no public dimension, that the realms of politics, of community, of shared experiences more generally, don’t belong in the genre, which is better suited to expressions of the inner spirit." Justin Quinn • LARB