The October 2023 issue of PMLA offers a wide-ranging selection of material on poetry: an essay on the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen; a look at metaphrasis in Renaissance poetics, by way of a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene; a comparison of two seventeenth-century poets, five thousand miles apart and unknown to each other, confronting the same philosophical question; and an introduction to and translation of the only known poem by the Senegalese author Mariama Bâ.