Ekphrasis is the literary device of depicting a visual work with a verbal description. A new anthology, Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography, gathers the ekphrastic poetry of more than 100 poets writing specifically in...
Eels, orts, and Wordle! Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about…eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud. Plus...
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s poem “In Praise of Mystery” will travel to the planet Jupiter on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. With the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America, Limon has also launched a project...
POSSLQ was devised by a worker at the U.S. Census Bureau as an acronym for Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters or Partner of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. Pronounced “possle-cue,” this term caught on briefly in the...
Chuck in Rutland, Vermont, has heard a phrase several times over the years that left him puzzled. If someone announces it’s late and they’re going to bed, and someone else questions that idea, the retiring one observes, Well, it’s...
Published in the mid-19th century, the poem “A Chapter of Ifs” elaborates at length on the phrase If ifs and ands were pots and pans. The gist is that one shouldn’t dwell upon things that may not come to pass. This is part of a...
