Bonnie Costello

Bonnie Costello is a professor of English at Boston University. Her most recent book is Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World. Other works include Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (2003), Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (1981), “Outside In and Upside Down: The World of Abelardo Morell,” Yale Review (2008), “Elizabeth Bishop’s Impersonal Personal,” American Literary History (2003), “John Ashbery’s Landscapes,” The Tribe of John (1995). Her “Fresh Woods: Elegy and Ecology Among the Ruins” was published in the Oxford Book of Elegy (2010). In 1990-91 she was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2001, she served as a panelist for the Bollingen Prize. Costello also translates poetry from Italian, and has published several essays on the subjects of art and travel, and recently a work of creative nonfiction called “The Mail from Tunis: A Fable of Proximity and Distance” in the fall 2011 issue of The Straddler.

Boston University bio page

Public television forum network page

By this author

The plural of us

Recently in Jacket2

Digital Poetics 2

Not Your Father’s Confessionalism

William Lessard

A blank text field. Oblong. With rounded corners. It is our refuge where we are free to say almost anything. Some treat it as a mail slot to dispatch their most personal thoughts. Others leap across it as a stage where they become a different person. Or a heaving jumble of Pessoa-like heteronyms, or what most people call trolls. Most of us troll without noticing, or we perform for clicks with a keen understanding that what we type (however non-factual) conjures data about what we are. An armchair existentialist might say the space mirrors the void inside us.

In Memoriam: Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024)

Jacket2 Editors

How do you begin to describe the many lives of Jerry Rothenberg, who passed away on Sunday at the age of ninety-two? His output as poet alone, or translator, or editor, or anthologist would be enough to secure his reputation for the ages, and yet he excelled in all those areas and more with equal brilliance, fervor, and prescience.

Jerome Rothenberg: December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024

A reflection from Amish Trivedi

Jerome Rothenberg

Well, we’ve come to our end here. Somehow, in the hundreds of hours of phone calls and emails and late nights and breakfasts after, Jerry and I had never once discussed what might happen to this space once he passed away. We have even published a number of obituaries for friends of Jerry’s over the years. I’m not entirely convinced, sitting here writing at 3 a.m., that Jerry thought I’d be left with this task — and not the other way around.