Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel. He said it was an incredible experience that he has tried to reproduce in his poetry. The musicality of poetry was and is extremely important to his work.

Grand, Modernist poetry, Rhythmic, Spare

'Coming Close' begins with a somber description of a worker who has been toiling with a polishing wheel for the previous three hours. As the poem hones in on the scene, the question arises: 'Is this really a woman?' Suddenly you are in the poem, probing the buff, mechanical body of this worker and ma

Intimate, Rough, Sincere, Spare, Visceral

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

"I have made London my home. For ten years, I avoided thinking about the China I had left behind. Then in 1988, my mother came to England to visit me. For the first time, she told me the story of her life and that of my grandmother. When she returned to Chengdu, I sat down and let my own memory surge

Intense, Political, Sincere, Spare, Women's literature