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Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. In 2023 PN Review celebrated its jubilee.

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PN Review 279
Featured Poem
The Banquet Stav Poleg … per lo naturale amore de la propria loquela

— Dante, Convivio

It was a difficult autumn, I reached for Dante
because I needed to walk out, needed to be taken

by the dark, unreliable highway
that links ethics to knowledge. All winter

I found myself running in the spiralling evenings
and streets of Florence – a city haunted

by longing – a road leading inwards
and outwards – shaken
... read more
In conversation with Neilson MacKay
Stanley Moss You told me a few minutes ago that you experience life in paragraphs. When I asked you what you meant by that, you said you would have to write a poem to find out. What gives?

I often say something without knowing why I said it. For example, I woke up from a dream saying, ‘Abandon ship!’ When I was in the Navy we were taught if necessary to abandon ship, but of course I never did and I never would. It bothers me to think that I would have somewhere to go, wishes that I would abandon, because I was afraid of some fucking torpedo. There are many poets who think – not only do they think but their readers think – they have something to say. I don’t write poems because I think I have something to say; I write poems to understand why I said something, try to find the way I said things.
... read more
Elegies
Lorna Goodison You’re enough to sift into an oblong alabaster box.
Flesh and bone charred and ground into griege
gravel fallout from torched cobalt blue winding
sheet; sheer dust of light blue shirt; the fabric grit
of serge trousers and wool socks; blue and white
smoke ropes of striped school tie; big voicebox –
site of forensic eloquence – burned down to silence.
Your long limbs set straight by undertaker’s hands.
St George’s boy, you forward and face flame dragon.



For an Athlete
... read more
Also in the magazine... Ophira GottliebFour Poems Horatio MorpurgoDiscovered during Repair Work Gabriel JosipoviciLoyalty and Death by the Blackwater River Gwyneth Lewisfrom Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling Meredi OrtegaThree Poems Anthony Vahni CapildeoLetter from Lima: The Company of Heaven
Selected from the Archive...
Diary of a Satyr Stanley Moss
When I was a child, I moved my pillow to a different part of the bed each night because I liked the feeling of not knowing where I was when I woke up. From the beginning I yearned for the nomadic life. I wandered, grazed like a goat on a hill - the move from grazing to exploring was just a leap over a fence. In my seventh year, I had a revelation. A teacher asked me a question. I knew the answer. Miss Green, a horse-faced redhead, asked the 3A class of P.S. 99, Kew Gardens, Queens, a long way from Byzantium: ‘What are you going to do in life?’ Most of the answers remain a blur, but someone said she was going to be a novelist and someone said he’d write a play, or for the movies. ... read more
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