All poetry involves a certain facility with words—and often rhymes and meter—but a few poems kick it up a notch and really make us rethink what you can even do with language. Here are five of my ...

Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read. A ...