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David Orr

David Orr writes about poetry for NPR Books. He is the author of Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetryand 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.

  • Monica Youn, who joined NPR as a NewsPoet <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/04/27/151517039/newspoet-monica-youn-writes-the-day-in-verse">last year</a>, works as a lawyer. She says that poetry appears in law more often than you might think — but nobody calls it poetry.
    From Dissections To Depositions, Poets' Second Jobs
    David Orr
    Great poetry almost never leads to great paychecks. Even award-winning poets need to pay the bills. Many teach, but others are doctors, scientists, lawyers, undertakers or even market analysts. In celebration of National Poetry Month, writer David Orr takes a look at the secret lives of poets.
  • It's A Genre! The Overdue Poetry Of Parenthood
    David Orr
    Love, death, marriage, divorce — poetry tends to focus on life's major moments. But that hasn't held true for birth and child rearing. Critic (and new dad) David Orr reflects on the reasons why, and on the women and men who are, at last, delivering the poetry of parenthood.
  • Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, the same year she won the Nobel Prize in literature. Szymborska, who was born in 1923, died Wednesday in Krakow, Poland.
    Wislawa Szymborska, Poet Of Gentle Irony, Dies At 88­
    David Orr
    The Polish poet, a Nobel Prize winner in 1996, died Wednesday in Krakow, Poland. Szymborska was an ironist who deployed whimsy and a light touch, even when exploring weighty themes. Critic David Orr praises her as a writer of "dry-eyed, athletic precision."
  • Truth And Beauty: 2011's Best American Poetry
    David Orr
    Critic David Orr surveys the "jumbled landscape" of American poetry to select his favorite collections of the year: five books that will alternately comfort and challenge you.