Despite their ever-present flora, it’s somewhat false to call the poems in Micrographia “nature poems.” While their topic may be the natural world—sumac and juniper, sparrows, lilacs, jots of fir—the book revolves on a much more ontological axis. An appreciation of nature is present throughout the book, but not the same kind of stillness found in Mary Oliver or Gary Snyder’s quieter verse. Here, nature stands to people as they relate to it (”The butterfly is pinned through its thorax . . . The name affixes to earth.”), not as something set aside elsewhere to be appreciated.

It has now been four years since the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina breeched the levees in and around New Orleans, producing the most widespread destruction that a major American city has suffered in the past century. At the time—nearly one year into George W. Bush’s second term—the woeful government response appeared to distill the worst features of GOP small-government ideology, while dramatizing Bush’s seeming indifference to the fortunes of the black, the poor, and city-dwelling Americans. Today, however, memories of Katrina and its aftermath have faded, and the moral of the story has gravitated into the familiar orbit of

When the United States declared war on Germany and Japan in 1941, Ernest Hemingway did not immediately travel to Europe as a journalist, as he had for the Spanish Civil War. Instead, he stuck around Havana, where he drank (Scotch and sodas, daiquiris) and went fishing. In a grandiose and ultimately ineffectual manner, he also devoted time to the Allied cause, hunting enemy submarines in a wooden fishing boat called the Pilar.

For women writers, motherhood is a tricky subject—well worn yet inexhaustible. For every book that celebrates children as miracles, there is another that describes the guilt of screwing up or getting Botox while pregnant. The subject is a cash crop: universally of interest, unlikely to go out of fashion, potentially controversial, and probably heartwarming. For a poet, the rules are different. The topics—labor, making cookies, postpartum depression—may be the same, but poetry is not naturally instructive. Rebecca Wolff’s poems about motherhood in The King, for instance, are ironic and dark, slippery and exploratory, loving but not blindly so. They are

Born in a storm and named after the biblical son of thunder, John Devine is delivered into a world of mythology: smalltown Ireland. He begins his days eking out a frugal, rural existence, dominated by his charismatic chainsmoking mother, Lily, and their faintly sinister neighbours, the sharp-tongued Phyllis Nagle and “mutton-headed” Harry Farrell, alcoholic handyman. With only a Harper’s Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts as distraction, John grows up an odd kid, nurturing an obsession with parasitic worms and nightmares about crows.

Barack Obama has long emphasized the importance of reforming American medical care, both as a candidate in the 2008 election and as president. During the month of June, however, he dramatically increased his efforts to secure major reform legislation by the end of the year.

What is an anthology? It is always a little too much and a bit too little. Too much, I mean, in particularly physical terms. The anthologies I own — “The Oxford Anthology of British Literature,” “The Best American Short Stories of the Century” — are prodigious volumes, not the little bouquets of verse denoted by the Greek anthologia. I leave them on my shelves. Sometimes, when I want to exert myself, I go over to where they sit next to the dictionaries and the grammarian handbooks. Otherwise, they sit dusty while I type something into Google. In the Internet Age,