In his calloused hands, with dirt under his fingernails, he carried the same torch that Wordsworth and Coleridge had used to set poetry aflame. Raymond Carver employed "the language really used by men" to tell the story of the damaged white American. Broken hearts populate Carver's literary country;

Dark, Distorted, Rough, Smoky, Southern gothic, Spare, Super-realism

A young woman struts down the Champs Elysee's in a gray wool suit tightly fitted to her slim body. The suit is decorated with large white butterflies that seem to flutter around her, giving her a special air of artistic sophistication. On her head another butterfly alights in the form of a small, ext

Clever, Distorted, Fantastic, Lush, Opulent, Surrealist fashion

It's a strange world that casts decor as its main character. This is the world of the Brothers Quay, in which all kinds of incomprehensible objects and machines hold the stage while human characters remain at their mercy. Disjointed, dreamy, labyrinthine, and oblique, this is a theater of the unconsc

Dark, Distorted, Dreamy, Ethereal, Layered, Melancholy

Craig Raine has an extraterrestrial sensibility. His 1979 volume, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," established a new school of poetry -- for those who experience this world as if it were Mars. Writing from the unfamiliar perspective of a space alien living in modern England, Raine forces his reader

Clever, Dense, Distorted, Illusive, Postmodern poetry, Quirky