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.

Marina Harss reviews Twyla Tharp’s Bach Partita, American Ballet Theatre: 1/3 Tharp is too interested in managing the amazing complexity of her construction and in finessing the transitions to pay much attention to the emotional impact of her choreography. Her Partita is majestic but dry.

Robert Archambeau on The Golden Book of Words by Bernadette Mayer, New Directions: 1/3 She feels...like she’s arrived in another country, one where she sometimes doubts her welcome, yet one where the sudden warm blast of community sentiment sometimes hits her like a thawing wind in winter...

Rachel Hadas reviews Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography, by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys @fsgbooks.bsky.social: 1/3 [Cavafy’s prose piece] “The Ships” stresses the arduous nature of the [poetic] journey, the care and patience required in handling the precious, breakable cargo—not to mention

Erick Neher reviews It Was Just an Accident, directed by Jafar Panahi: Panahi satirizes the horrors of authoritarian rule through the prism of a personal story, where choices, betrayals, and survival intersect in ways that are both brutal and painfully human…deeply political yet intimate.

"Sonnet Upon the James Webb Space Telescope" by Robert Schultz: 1/3 Because distance is time, this photograph, Taken by Earthlings, can show us a time Before there was Earth. It feels as if We’ve cut the ground from under our feet. Fine.

Becky Y. Lu on Renaissance composers Palestrina and Gesualdo: 1/3 The trade-off between clarity and complexity was the crux of Renaissance musical debates that Palestrina ultimately won, owing to his perfected counterpoint that allowed the words to be intelligible.

Cary Holladay reviews The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, trans. by Martin Aitken from New Directions: The wax child is an ingenious storytelling device, its incantatory voice rich with imagery…Olga Ravn delivers a story ripe with suspense and immersive detail. hudsonreview.com/2026/02/witc...

Robert Archambeau reviews Pastorals by Rachel Hadas from Measure Press: Hadas’ book brings us into [mortality's] presence with something like acceptance and with a comforting faith that life, family, and our much-loved places will all go on when we live only in memory.

Brian Brodeur reflects on contemporary Gothic verse narratives: 1/3 Readers unfamiliar with this tradition might wonder why poets turn to Gothic. Predicated on limit and transgression, this genre strains against the constraints of plausibility.

Karen Wilkin on “Lisa Corinne Davis: Syllogism” at Miles McEnery: 1/2 Davis displayed her usual virtuosity in juggling layers of sharp-edged floating shapes—mostly small rectangles—keeping them aloft by means of intense, often strongly contrasting color…each canvas was surprising and unpredictable.

A mesmerizing novel by Vigdis Hjorth…Every moment conveys a sense of firstness…Violence lurks in this searing retrospective. I read Repetition in a single night. —Cary Holladay reviews Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund @versobooks.bsky.social hudsonreview.com/2026/02/witc...

Mark Jarman on Seamus Heaney’s collected poems, ed. by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue, & Matthew Hollis @fsgbooks.bsky.social 1/3 One of Heaney’s tasks has been...to show the English how their language can sound in the speech of those they have tried unsuccessfully to make one of them.

Marina Harss reviews Jerome Robbins’ Goldberg Variations, @nycballet.bsky.social: 1/4 Goldberg Variations has quietly re-entered the building. I watched it twice last season, struck each time not only by its tranquil mastery and deep musical understanding, but also by the way it shows the company,

Our winter issue (& new website!!!) is now online! Featuring fiction by Leslie Pietrzyk, nonfiction by Brian Brodeur, poetry by Natania Rosenfeld, reviews by Marina Harss, Karen Wilkin, Brooke Allen & Mark Jarman, a letter from London by James Campbell, & more! hudsonreview.com

“1. So Busy I wonder what my left brain has been up to During all these years of virtual silence…” Read Marilyn Nelson’s poem “Eleven Lebens,” published in @hudsonreview.bsky.social & featured in our #BlackHistoryMonth reading list: hudsonreview.com/2025/10/elev...

“First came the drama, meeting the man who would become the baby’s father. On her way back to the dorm room from seeing the movie Body Snatchers…” Read Reyumeh Ejue’s “Full Term” in @hudsonreview.bsky.social! #BlackHistoryMonth hudsonreview.com/2025/02/full...

[Roman] Mejia’s youthful hunger for movement makes the audience buzz—and what a jump! He emanates a giddy joy…Dancers like these make us eager to go to the ballet. —Marina Harss reviews Roman Mejia in Jerome Robbins’ A Suite of Dances, NYC Ballet.

The pleasures of Martin enfold and are enfolded by an epicurean’s comprehension of life’s brevity and richness. —Mark Jarman reviews The Khayyam Suite by Charles Martin @hopkinspress.bsky.social hudsonreview.com/2025/10/livi...

From “The Life to Come” by Stephen Edgar: 1/2 ...At death, The Aztecs thought the human soul, as I Have somewhere read, becomes a butterfly, Or dwells in one, but cannot long delay Its dissolution, and soon drains away.

I can imagine Whitman writing with this warmth of human connection and Hart Crane slipping into the skin of each passenger via his exotic inventions of language...this new poet, new to me at least, rubs elbows with them. —Mark Jarman on No Known Coordinates by Maria Terrone from The Word Works

Gary Shteyngart outdoes himself with Vera, or Faith...This is What Maisie Knew for contemporary readers who would rather laugh than cry as our country becomes increasingly authoritarian and racist. —Susan Balée on Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart from Random House hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...

From “Sonnet” by Dylan Carpenter: 1/2 I am beside myself, being always here And never somewhere else. The way I am Like a stone scraped against a stone and placed Beside that stone...I am not who I am.

Bruce Whiteman on Homer’s Iliad, trans. by Jeffrey M. Duban from Clairview Books: 1/2 Duban has striven to create an Iliad “new by virtue of its datedness,” but that was an unrealizable goal....Duban claims quite correctly that a translation can be “at once faithful and beautiful.”

Michael Thurston reviews T. S. Eliot’s Collected Prose in 4 volumes, ed. by Archie Burnett @faberbooks.bsky.social : 1/3 The most important picture that emerges from these thousands of pages is that of a writer who works hard at writing both as a means of expression and as a mode of thought.

What don’t we know about each other, the lady with new boots, the driver Maxine? Cloud shadows pass, shops go by, bicyclists, mothers with strollers, all with their own unsettled futures, uncertain concealments, inwardness, and innocence, stumbling wonder. —From “Like Life” by Mark Kraushaar

Mark Jarman reviews The Occupant by Jennifer Maier @upittpress.bsky.social : 1/3 None of the great poets of the life of things...wonder if their regard for things is proper or ethical or distorting. Maier imagines returning each thing with “a note of thanks"...

From “At Pillings Lake” by David Livewell: 1/2 To one kid, Mr. Frost was Robert Frost. At Pillings Lake, he’d greet us at the gate: Wrinkled, white-haired, and wise. The old man tossed The day-pass on our dash, then winked. I’d wait

From "Reflections on Projection” by Andrew Stark: 1/3 Two things can bear as little resemblance as chalk and cheese. But if we have forged an association between them—my math teacher threw a piece of chalk at me in 9th grade, for example, when I tried to eat a piece of cheese

Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 2025 poetry contest! All winners have been notified individually, and will be formally announced and published in our Spring 2026 issue. Our next poetry contest will open on April 1, 2027.

The wilderness survival story has been given a twist by the nimble Mr. Walter, who may have invented a new genre, the how-to-survive-whackjob-cults-in-the-wilderness novel. It’s a lot of fun. —Susan Balée reviews So Far Gone by Jess Walter, from Harper. hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...

From “Dilapidated Sonnet” by Matt Quinn: 1/2 The hole in the roof of the garage across the road just spoke to me, said how much it wanted me, that I should clamber up, lean in, let go. It offered me a musty kind of sleep in with all the things it stores,

Erick Neher on Tennessee Williams' “Camino Real,” at Williamstown Theatre Festival: 1/4 A large supporting cast inhabits a wide variety of eccentrics searching for meaning amid the general madness. This search mirrors the audience’s experience: Camino Real is the very definition of a hot mess.

...off-red rose hips that clung to the bush all winter. The flowers fell long since, but those small globes offer intimations of hope. So I try to imagine, because the dismal bog needs a counter-vision… —From “A Bog in Late March” by Sydney Lea. Read the rest at hudsonreview.com/2025/10/i-li...

The great French poet and master of the form Francis Ponge [comes to mind]....Trousdale has mastered a number of discourses and found the comedy and pathos in each of them. —Mark Jarman reviews Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem by Rachel Trousdale from Wesleyan University Press

Marina Harss reviews Alexei Ratmansky's Solitude, New York City Ballet: 1/3 Solitude is almost shocking in its unflinching depiction of the fragmentation of consciousness produced by loss…we see an embodiment of mourning: a man teetering on the edge of the void, aching to join the dead.

Susan Balée reviews Katabasis by R. F. Kuang from Harper Voyager: 1/2 Katabasis felt to me like just a parody of academic life by someone deeply ambivalent about graduate school...the prose flowed and academia can indeed be a fascinating hellscape, but it’s not a book I’ll revisit.

Ozon expertly contrasts the soft beauty of the characters’ surroundings with the harsh reality of their inner lives, creating an aura of menace no matter how banal the on-screen activities might be....An old-fashioned, well-made drama. —Brooke Allen reviews When Fall Is Coming, dir. François Ozon

From “At the Spaniard Inn” by David Livewell, about poet Desmond O’Grady: 1/2 He’s in the churchyard now, the plot he picked, Rincurran Cottage and his writing window still staring back—but from the other side.