Izumi Shikibu, born around the year 974, lived and wrote during the golden period of Japan’s Heian court. She was “committed to a life of both religious consciousness and erotic intensity,” the poet Jane Hirshfield and her translation partner Mariko Aratani tell us in the introduction to The Ink Dark Moon, their translations of ancient court love poetry.

Garrett Hongo, a fourth-generation Japanese American, was born in Hawaii and raised in Los Angeles from the age of six. But for a period of time in his thirties and early forties he moved back to Volcano, the small town where he was born, and lived in the shadow of Kilauea. The experience gave rise to his memoir, Volcano, as well as to a number of poems, like this one from his 1987 book, The River of Heaven.

The poet Laurie Sheck recently published a work that is perhaps not exactly poetry, but is not a straight novel either—A Monster’s Notes is a genre-defying book reimagining the life of Mary Shelley’s monster. In Sheck’s version, the monster is a figure Mary met as a young girl while visiting her mother’s grave, a strange being both mesmerizing and terrifying to her, whom she later wrote into her novel as Victor Frankenstein’s creation.

The poet David Lehman, most recently the author of Yeshiva Boys, writes about the artistry and joy of American song in A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. Though not officially poets, the great lyricists more than lived up to Ira Gershwin’s ideal of “rhymed conversation.”

From W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen, one of those poems that chases its own tail and can be read many times as we curve around the circle from its question to its near-answer and perhaps back again to consider the question…

The poem below is one section of Irving Feldman’s “All of Us Here,” the centerpiece of his 1986 collection of the same name. The sequence, inspired by an exhibition of George Segal’s sculptures, is an intricate and haunting meditation that has been the subject of academic study; an essay on Feldman’s work by Charles Altieri describes the way that a room full of Segal’s figures “proposes a world turned to simulacra, a horrifying sense of post-Holocaust indifference to difference,” and becomes a challenge to the very notion of identity. In this many-voiced poem of nineteen parts, Feldman, both a heady poet-philospher and a purveyor of straight talk, honors our search for a coherent self in the face of what Altieri terms our “endlessly proliferating doubles.”