The Hudson Review
Quarterly magazine of literature and the arts, founded in 1948. Poetry, fiction, essays, and more.
- [Roman] Mejia’s youthful hunger for movement makes the audience buzz—and what a jump! He emanates a giddy joy…Dancers like these make us eager to go to the ballet. —Marina Harss reviews Roman Mejia in Jerome Robbins’ A Suite of Dances, NYC Ballet.
- The pleasures of Martin enfold and are enfolded by an epicurean’s comprehension of life’s brevity and richness. —Mark Jarman reviews The Khayyam Suite by Charles Martin @hopkinspress.bsky.social hudsonreview.com/2025/10/livi...
- From “The Life to Come” by Stephen Edgar: 1/2 ...At death, The Aztecs thought the human soul, as I Have somewhere read, becomes a butterfly, Or dwells in one, but cannot long delay Its dissolution, and soon drains away.
- I can imagine Whitman writing with this warmth of human connection and Hart Crane slipping into the skin of each passenger via his exotic inventions of language...this new poet, new to me at least, rubs elbows with them. —Mark Jarman on No Known Coordinates by Maria Terrone from The Word Works
- Gary Shteyngart outdoes himself with Vera, or Faith...This is What Maisie Knew for contemporary readers who would rather laugh than cry as our country becomes increasingly authoritarian and racist. —Susan Balée on Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart from Random House hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...
- From “Sonnet” by Dylan Carpenter: 1/2 I am beside myself, being always here And never somewhere else. The way I am Like a stone scraped against a stone and placed Beside that stone...I am not who I am.
- Bruce Whiteman on Homer’s Iliad, trans. by Jeffrey M. Duban from Clairview Books: 1/2 Duban has striven to create an Iliad “new by virtue of its datedness,” but that was an unrealizable goal....Duban claims quite correctly that a translation can be “at once faithful and beautiful.”
- Michael Thurston reviews T. S. Eliot’s Collected Prose in 4 volumes, ed. by Archie Burnett @faberbooks.bsky.social : 1/3 The most important picture that emerges from these thousands of pages is that of a writer who works hard at writing both as a means of expression and as a mode of thought.
- What don’t we know about each other, the lady with new boots, the driver Maxine? Cloud shadows pass, shops go by, bicyclists, mothers with strollers, all with their own unsettled futures, uncertain concealments, inwardness, and innocence, stumbling wonder. —From “Like Life” by Mark Kraushaar
- Mark Jarman reviews The Occupant by Jennifer Maier @upittpress.bsky.social : 1/3 None of the great poets of the life of things...wonder if their regard for things is proper or ethical or distorting. Maier imagines returning each thing with “a note of thanks"...
- 2/3 I want to say with this book that we are in the presence of a cunning critique of capitalism, ownership, with a wit that transcends Marxism. But it is the poet’s role to remind us that even that politically astute view has to be temporary...
- From “At Pillings Lake” by David Livewell: 1/2 To one kid, Mr. Frost was Robert Frost. At Pillings Lake, he’d greet us at the gate: Wrinkled, white-haired, and wise. The old man tossed The day-pass on our dash, then winked. I’d wait
- From "Reflections on Projection” by Andrew Stark: 1/3 Two things can bear as little resemblance as chalk and cheese. But if we have forged an association between them—my math teacher threw a piece of chalk at me in 9th grade, for example, when I tried to eat a piece of cheese
- Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 2025 poetry contest! All winners have been notified individually, and will be formally announced and published in our Spring 2026 issue. Our next poetry contest will open on April 1, 2027.
- The wilderness survival story has been given a twist by the nimble Mr. Walter, who may have invented a new genre, the how-to-survive-whackjob-cults-in-the-wilderness novel. It’s a lot of fun. —Susan Balée reviews So Far Gone by Jess Walter, from Harper. hudsonreview.com/2025/10/the-...
- From “Dilapidated Sonnet” by Matt Quinn: 1/2 The hole in the roof of the garage across the road just spoke to me, said how much it wanted me, that I should clamber up, lean in, let go. It offered me a musty kind of sleep in with all the things it stores,
- Erick Neher on Tennessee Williams' “Camino Real,” at Williamstown Theatre Festival: 1/4 A large supporting cast inhabits a wide variety of eccentrics searching for meaning amid the general madness. This search mirrors the audience’s experience: Camino Real is the very definition of a hot mess.
- ...off-red rose hips that clung to the bush all winter. The flowers fell long since, but those small globes offer intimations of hope. So I try to imagine, because the dismal bog needs a counter-vision… —From “A Bog in Late March” by Sydney Lea. Read the rest at hudsonreview.com/2025/10/i-li...
- The great French poet and master of the form Francis Ponge [comes to mind]....Trousdale has mastered a number of discourses and found the comedy and pathos in each of them. —Mark Jarman reviews Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem by Rachel Trousdale from Wesleyan University Press
- Marina Harss reviews Alexei Ratmansky's Solitude, New York City Ballet: 1/3 Solitude is almost shocking in its unflinching depiction of the fragmentation of consciousness produced by loss…we see an embodiment of mourning: a man teetering on the edge of the void, aching to join the dead.
- Susan Balée reviews Katabasis by R. F. Kuang from Harper Voyager: 1/2 Katabasis felt to me like just a parody of academic life by someone deeply ambivalent about graduate school...the prose flowed and academia can indeed be a fascinating hellscape, but it’s not a book I’ll revisit.
- Ozon expertly contrasts the soft beauty of the characters’ surroundings with the harsh reality of their inner lives, creating an aura of menace no matter how banal the on-screen activities might be....An old-fashioned, well-made drama. —Brooke Allen reviews When Fall Is Coming, dir. François Ozon
- From “At the Spaniard Inn” by David Livewell, about poet Desmond O’Grady: 1/2 He’s in the churchyard now, the plot he picked, Rincurran Cottage and his writing window still staring back—but from the other side.
- From “Trimalchio in West Egg at 100: Gatsby and Modern Character” by Robert Archambeau: 1/3 There is some irony in how Trimalchio became the model for Jay Gatsby, in that a curious reversal happens to the very idea of literary character in Fitzgerald’s greatest and most resonant creation.
