From “My Ignorance” by D. Nurkse: Here is a robin, eyes like marble, claws like burnt matchsticks, still bleeding in the snow. The child watches and holds her breath. Do you know about the blue snow, falling all night while you sleep? Have you seen the sky in a dream?

Erick Neher reviews the Chess revival at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre: 1/5 Chess is never going to work as logical storytelling…But I must confess that despite its compositional failings, this production works remarkably well and is even thrilling on a regular basis…

Marina Harss reviews Via Dolorosa, choreography by Mark Morris: 1/2 Morris is unique today in his ability to pare down movement and ideas to their most essential, so that they register with particular clarity and resonance. Movement and sound appear to say exactly the same thing. It is a gift.

From “Salvage” by Sydney Lea: 1/2 That recall from back thirty years makes my thoughts start to pulse like those embers. It’s too unsurprising, the threat of tears, my descent to a shadow-world,

Mark Jarman reviews Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne @graywolfpress.bsky.social: 1/4 Other poets have described this crime [slavery] in its horrible dimensions, but Kilbourne, I think, is the first to give it the scientific gloss applied by its European perpetrators.

From “At the Cemetery, Again” by Robert Cording: 1/2 Is this devotion?—this coming here to plant a few begonias, place a stone or a few flowers. Or do nothing but sit on the stone wall under the maple that overhangs your grave. The clouds stream by, and cars, not many, but always

David Mason reviews The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes from @pantheonbooks.bsky.social: 1/3 “Was Tennyson ever young?” Holmes asks. “It might seem unlikely. For generations he has been enshrined in the national memory as an ancient Victorian bard with a tremendous beard.”

Brooke Allen on Song Sung Blue, dir. Craig Brewer: 1/3 Realism without condescension: that’s what’s refreshing here. There is no sly smirk in the direction of Mike, a man who earnestly worships a musical artist sneered at by the cultural elite. He is presented in what amounts to a heroic manner;

From “The Gates of Love” by Cary Holladay: Her old high school sat right across the street, a Memphis landmark. The neon sunsets above it seemed like a sign: You learned here, now work here. Soon she found herself teaching Biology, her college major. How strange the school felt, like a dream.

Tom Wilhelmus on The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie: So rich, so imaginative, so voluble, so much in tune with and exemplary of our times, its disorder, its crimes, depressingly (and vainly) Rushdie seems to be predicting the death of language and literature along with his own eventual demise.

Erick Neher reviews Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses: 1/3 Ulysses is the archetypal work in which nothing and everything happens in a day…[in which] each minute is filled with a hundred diverse thoughts, insights, rages, loves, and epiphanies. Elevator Repair Service lets that contradiction stand,

Mark Jarman reviews Cartographies of Home by Priscilla Long from MoonPath Press: 1/3 It is Long’s title which got me thinking about these collections as maps or plots, grids, outlines for maps. The title reminds us that every home may be mapped differently but for the same reasons.

Karen Wilkin on Martin Puryear at MFA Boston: 1/3 Among the most powerful works was A Column for Sally Hemings (2021), a tapering, fluted shaft of white marble topped by an iron shackle, an homage to the enslaved African-American woman with whom Thomas Jefferson famously had a long relationship.…

Each form is so beautifully suited to its subject, each container to Majmudar’s mercurial and multitudinous muse, that the poet’s choices feel inevitable. —Rachel Hadas reviews Things My Grandmother Said by Amit Majmudar @aaknopf.bsky.social hudsonreview.com/2026/05/all-...

Marina Harss reviews Ratmansky's Firebird, performed by American Ballet Theatre: 1/5 Years ago I asked Ratmansky about the meaning of his ending, trying to ascertain whether he was commenting on Putin’s Russia, as I suspected. He said that yes, in a way, he was.

From "The Shabby Curate and the Imagiste," an essay by Charles Martin: 1/2 But the poet of ideas is always going to be rethinking those ideas, altering, and whenever deemed necessary, erasing them, while the visionary poet is content to let the vision stand.

Read “The Shrew” by Daniel Cowper, honorable mention in our poetry contest: 1/3 Ringed by a zone of blighted grass a shrew’s corpse lies—frosted glass for eyes, ears down, pale paws tucked primly under elongated jaws.

Read "Asking for Bread" by Ethan Chua, third-prize winner of our poetry contest: 1/6 At the Italian restaurant, with olive oil and vinegar it costs me no more than the asking. At nine, knees on the hassock, palms trembling just a little. Can I get it wrong, the asking?

"Built Close to Water, No. 1" by Mary Fontana, 2nd-prize winner of our poetry contest: 1/3 Planted on a rise before the grim pine forest, eight birch candles, some snuffed out. The family’s matriarch famously hauled water from the well those first parched summers. Stoic about

Read "Egg Tooth" by Arah Ko, first-prize winner of our poetry contest: 1/4 You said don’t count your chickens, but of course I do. Smooth eggs turning in the humid warmth of a home incubator, embryos stirring, veiny in the yolk. I’ve given each a name before they hatch,

Our spring issue is online…featuring our 2025 poetry contest winners!!!!! Congrats to Arah Ko, Mary Fontana, Ethan Chua, & Daniel Cowper. Also in the issue is fiction by Louise Marburg & Cary Holladay, essays by Charles Martin & Charles McGrath, lots of reviews and more poetry! hudsonreview.com

Congrats to the winners of our 2025 Frederick Morgan Poetry Contest: 1st, Arah Ko; 2nd, Mary Fontana; 3rd, Ethan Chua; and honorable mention Daniel Cowper. We’re so excited to be publishing these poems! Read them in our Spring 2026 issue, free to nonsubscribers: hudsonreview.com

Robert Archambeau on You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems by Rebecca Foust: 1/2 Foust’s Julia [of Orwell's 1984] offers us just the thinnest ray of light pushing through the pervading darkness when she imagines how, “In the sequel, I find you again”…

Karen Wilkin reviews Liliane Tomasko at Nino Mier: 1/4 The range of shapes and gestures competing for space suggested barely contained energy, heightened by Tomasko’s subtle palette of neutrals punctuated with often generous intense notes of reds, oranges, and the occasional saturated blue.

From “Letter from London” by James Campbell: 1/2 A proper bibliophile I knew once said that even if nothing in particular catches the eye, you ought to buy something anyway.

Erick Neher reviews Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater: 1/4 A bigger problem with Blue Moon is that it seriously undersells Hart’s genius. We are given little explanation of why we should care so much about this sad, self-destructive man.

From “Memorable Figures” by Ellen Kaufman: 1/2 In 2021 Maya Lin supervised the planting of dead trees among the living ones, tall straight pines for which deep holes were driven. At first they weren’t noticed —it was March. Then spring

Karen Wilkin reviews Sangram Majumdar’s “The Sleep of Reason” at Nathalie Karg Gallery: 1/4 Majumdar’s recent work is sensuously colored and constructed with rhythmic shapes, yet we are kept slightly off-balance.

William H. Pritchard reviews Vol. 10 of T. S. Eliot’s letters, ed. by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden @faberbooks.bsky.social: 1/2 On another occasion he wrote to his friend Conrad Aiken that “Letters should be indiscretions—otherwise they are simply official bulletins.”

Cary Holladay reviews The Little Lights of Town by Jonathan Johnson @cmupress.bsky.social: I was drawn to the strong sense of place in The Little Lights of Town...Solid realism, clear prose, and depictions of the brooding Lake Superior distinguish the book. hudsonreview.com/2026/02/witc...

From the essay “The Intertidal Zone” by Michael Carson: 1/2 A pelican axed into the nearby bayou, shivered out, and clomped down on the dock just beyond where I ate. “The brown pelican,” I wrote in my notebook, “is the most ridiculous creature ever created by God.”

Karen Wilkin reviews Kyle Staver at Nino Mier: 1/3 Throughout…stars, stripes, and American flags appear…sometimes where you least expect it, defusing associations with current demands for announcements of patriotism and turning the motifs into just another explosive, cheerful circus element.

From “The Fells” by Natania Rosenfeld: 1/2 As the fells approached, grief returned. Unlike those where we live now, these mountains are naked as loss, and yet: velvet, red,

Erick Neher on The Secret Agent, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho: 1/3 In a cinematic coup, a series of flash-forwards that don’t begin until well into the film reveals that Armando’s story is being pieced together decades later by…an archivist listening to old surveillance tapes and interviews…

Brooke Allen on Friends Until the End by James Grant, W. W. Norton: 1/4 If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that politics is theater. And seldom have two more histrionically gifted performers strutted the political stage than Charles James Fox (1749–1806) and Edmund Burke (1729–1797),

Cary Holladay reviews The Salvage by Anbara Salam from Tin House: 1/2 Having wanted a thriller—which the opening chapter seemed to promise—I was disappointed by the slapstick turn the book takes. The characters are “characters,” rolling their eyes…and Marta’s emotional center never cohered for me…

From “Stanley Moss” by Priscilla Long: 1/2 I will begin to use the word love in poems, long scorned until Stanley Moss wrote I consider all stories love stories. Think of me as a long poem,

Robert Archambeau reviews Cord Swell by brittny ray crowell from W. W. Norton: The palpable love for home and family that pervades the entire book both holds it together as a collection and offers the reader a sustaining dose of positivity. hudsonreview.com/2026/02/revi...

Erick Neher reviews Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier: 1/4 Both Gustav and Nora use their deep-seated familial grudges for artistic purposes, he to mythologize memory and she to overcome it.

Karen Wilkin reviews Clintel Steed: Different Time Zones, Different Dimensions” at Shrine Gallery: 1/3 The paintings were dazzlingly constructed, their multiple, fractured planes and robust paint-handling all contributing to a sense of inevitability and surprise,

Bruce Whiteman reviews Émile Zola: A Determined Life @reaktionbooks.bsky.social: 1/4 Robert Lethbridge’s study...expertly combines literary criticism with literary biography. Most if not quite all of the Rougon-Macquart novels are examined, as well as Zola’s earlier and later books;

Karen Wilkin reviews Katherine Bradford at CANADA: 1/3 “Katherine Bradford: Communal Table” offered the most recent version of her alternative universe of just plain gorgeous color, plainspoken forms, forthright brushmarks, and an irreverent spirit, at once seductive and with an edge.

Robert Archambeau reviews The Other Love by Henri Cole @fsgbooks.bsky.social : The strength of the plainspoken, modest poems in The Other Love [lies] in the way it holds [consolations] in tension with the real pain in the world, with which they can be juxtaposed but which they cannot erase.

Karen Wilkin on Susannah Phillips at Bookstein Projects: 1/2 One can only applaud Phillips’ audacity in taking on a time-honored theme and turning it into something completely personal, not only updating a conventional motif, but also making it fresh and compelling—and a little mysterious.

Annie Zaidi's “Zinnias in the Graveyard” begins, “It wasn’t at all like the movies. In movie graveyards, the prospect of the dead coming back loomed large. Moonlit headstones cracking open & so on.” Read the @hudsonreview.bsky.social story for #WomensHistoryMonth: hudsonreview.com/2025/08/zinn...

David Mason reviews Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, by Francesca Wade @scribnerbooks.bsky.social: 1/2 Wade’s book is excellent, authoritative in its way because it leaves her controversial subject properly controversial. Even before her prologue we find a spread of quotations about Stein:

Erick Neher reviews Nouvelle Vague dir. Richard Linklater: 1/4 Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague…is ingratiating, clear, and exceedingly reverent of its subjects. I have little doubt that Godard would have hated it as it represents everything he fought against as a filmmaker. Perhaps this was inevitable.

Becky Y. Lu reviews Marsalis: 1/3 A common critique of Marsalis’ work is that it lacks logical development; there is no musico-theoretical reason that a New Orleans jazz band riff belongs in the same piece, let alone the same movement, as a neo-Romantic, Korngoldian melody.

Cary Holladay reviews Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa @littlebrown.bsky.social: A delightful short novel that made me laugh aloud.…I loved the comedy and poignance of Ning’s observations, the tension between her inner life and her behavior. hudsonreview.com/2026/02/witc...

Read a hilarious story about the desert, a bad boyfriend(?), and a missing mother: “Krista Robinson, Age 21 3/4, Wants These Things to Be True” @lesliepwriter.bsky.social : 1/5 Why’s the special thing he brought just for me so ugly? Say, I love it.