David Orr

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David Orr writes about poetry for NPR Books. He is the author of Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry and serves as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review.

Orr's criticism has been honored with Poetry magazine's Editor's Prize for Reviewing and with the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

4:35pm

Tue July 24, 2012
Poetry

It's A Genre! The Overdue Poetry Of Parenthood

Originally published on Fri July 27, 2012 2:26 pm

Credit iStockphoto.com

Birth, most people would agree, is a fairly important event. And poetry, most people would agree, tends to focus on subjects of intense emotional significance. So one would think the poetry of early parenthood would be a rich and varied category, filled with reflections on physical transformation, the emergence of life, the realities of infanthood and so forth.

One would be wrong.

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