"The evening forgives the alleyway", Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poems – but such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbons's emblematic, vividly presented scenes,...

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways – guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed artic...

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience – a chance encounter with a ve...