Poetry
Tailor-Made
How can a punishment fit a crime?
What’s not ill-suited to a wrong?
The pants will always be too long;
Sisyphus got his overtime,
But how irrelevant! being light
In a heavy, dark and wrenching wind
Didn’t drape well across the kind
Of shape poor dear Francesca’s tight
Little hot games with Paolo took.
Sagging, with their braces frayed,
The overkill, the underplayed
Will always have an ugly look.
Contributor
John HollanderJohn Hollander is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale. His most recent collection of poetry is A Draft of Light (Knopf, 2008).
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers
By Yvonne C. GarrettFEB 2020 | Books
Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime By Women Writers is a patriarchy-challenging collection of noir by women. Not all of these tales are told from a woman’s perspective, nor are they all presenting a feminist perspective, but most are wonderfully wrought, chilling tales of revenge, redemption, the evil that men do, and just what these women do about it.
Kevin Carey’s Murder in the Marsh
By Carissa ChesanekDEC 20-JAN 21 | Books
Kevin Carey’s latest novel, Murder in the Marsh, is everything you could want in crime noir. It’s gritty and face-paced, centering around a “murky marsh” and a down-and-out detective with a fuzzy past that haunts him.
Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957
By Re'al ChristianNOV 2020 | Art Books
This photobook reproduces more than 50 of approximately 300 photographs Parks took during his Life magazine assignment, revealing both the humanity of those who have been convicted of crimes and how race and class determine the extent to which criminals are prosecuted.
Ebony G. Patterson: ...to dig between the cuts, beneath the leaves, below the soil?
By Amber Officer-NarvasaDEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen
In 1899, the British colonial administration in Jamaica passed a set of legislation known as the Public Gardens Regulation Act. Designed to systematize the maintenance of public spaces throughout the island, the act established a framework of policing and punishment on “any land maintained at public expense.”
