For a long time, the word kavi, Sanskrit for “poet,” was synonymous for me with a man named Kuvempu. He was the Rashtra Kavi, the national poet, of people who spoke Kannada, the language of the part of South India where I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. Kuvempu’s verse—lucid, patriotic, nature loving—was taught in primary schools and sung on the radio; when you drove into the countryside, you found his poems painted near waterfalls and framed in the midst of rose gardens. Even as a boy, I knew that where Kannada-speaking territory ended, so did Kuvempu’s fame. Our neighbors spoke Tamil—a very

Jeffrey Eugenides is used to situating himself between the sexes. He is not quite the author of The Portrait of a Lady in this regard (Elizabeth Hardwick, when asked once to name her favorite American female novelist, wittily answered, “Henry James”), but then who is? Eugenides is certainly more interested in the sexual act itself than James ever was. Like John Updike, but with significantly more emotional content, he is curious about the mechanics entailed in the joining of bodies, the physical sensations that attach to the act of love. Above all, he seeks to render the experience—whether of

In Alan Hollinghurst’s captivating 1988 debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, the footloose young aristocrat and would-be biographer William Beckwith is consoled by a friend after he learns of a devastating chapter in his family’s history. “Isn’t there a kind of blind spot . . . for that period just before one was born? One knows about the Second World War, one knows about Suez, I suppose, but what people were actually getting up to in those years . . . There’s an empty, motiveless space until one appears on the scene.” Blind spots—familial, sexual, national—have fascinated Hollinghurst in all his

Some narrators speak certainly, and others shyly stammer, revealing their stories with reluctance and unease. Think of Moby-Dick, which begins, “Call me Ishmael,” and then consider John Barth’s The End of the Road (1958), which opens on a more jittery note: “In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.” Horner’s nervous squirming came to mind while I was reading Another Ventriloquist, the finely turned and intelligent collection of stories by Adam Gilders, a Canadian author who wrote for the National Post and The Walrus and published his fiction in the Paris Review, among other magazines.

Gilders, who in

Peter Gizzi’s poems have always walked a line between stylized opacity and friendly, if melancholy, accessibility, enacting an argument about whether language is esoteric or generic, personal or public, our salvation from commerce or hopelessly commodified. This argument is at the heart of much contemporary poetry, but for Gizzi it also represents an interior struggle between the need to disclose emotion with words and the need to hide it behind words. The interplay between these two ideas has never been stronger than in his new collection, Threshold Songs, in which the author is haunted by