In her searching, elegant memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead, 320 pages, $25.95), out next month, the poet Meghan O'Rourke describes just the same tension between outer and inner inherent in the experience of loss. Confronting the problem of suffering being inexpressible yet utterable, she gives an emphatically public account of her grief after her mother's death at 55. Ms. O'Rourke tells the story of her mother's battle against cancer, crafting an intimate portrait of a family in its greatest joy and worst agony. Barbara O'Rourke emerges as an extraordinarily strong and loving mother, magnetic and demanding. "Like a fool, I fell in love with you," Ms. O'Rourke thinks, after her diagnosis. "But you were always likely to die first."

For all her mother's vividness, the book is not about her life; it's about Ms. O'Rourke's own struggle to make her way through extreme and lasting sadness. This struggle is deeply personal, but Ms. O'Rourke insists that her difficulty is also the result of our culture treating grief as a private psychological process, leaving us without language and social rituals to guide us. Asserting that "in our culture of display, the sadness of death is largely silent," Ms. O'Rourke moves deftly between recording her particular experience of disorientation and loneliness and analyzing our general cultural obsession with accepting loss--letting go, moving on--and intolerance for prolonged or complicated sadness. Friends are presumptuously sympathetic or awkwardly evasive; lovers are inexplicably distant or inconveniently needy. But, Ms. O'Rourke suggests, it's not really their fault; the inadequacy of their support is symptomatic of a cultural uneasiness with death, with total loss.

In the year after her mother's death, Ms. O'Rourke finds that nothing has prepared her for her grief, least of all language. She feels "heartsickness, like the sadness you feel after a breakup, but many times stronger and more desperate." She seeks a new vocabulary, turning to metaphors to capture her specific loss: Her mother is the wind, her loss is an amputation, her mourning is a tree growing around an obstruction, but she finds such substitutions unsatisfying. She dutifully reads clinical literature on grief, but uses its terms warily. She points out that we don't have a word for having lost a parent, only "orphan" for having lost both. She surveys great works dealing with death, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Proust to Woolf, and incorporates poetry with great facility.

Ms. O'Rourke's relationship to language throughout the book reflects her ambivalence about communicating her experience in the first place. As strongly as she calls for a shared language and shared rituals to work against the idea that grief is private, or that it's universally surmountable, she refuses to portray her grief as representative, as anything but hers. "I am writing about my grief, of course," she says, not "because I think it was more extreme, more unusual, more special than anyone else's." Her voice wavers between startlingly beautiful turns of phrase and aggressive repetition, establishing a vocabulary for loss that is at once idiosyncratic and prescriptive.

For Ms. O'Rourke, the problem with communicating grief is not just that the intensity of emotion exceeds the language that serves as its vehicle. It's also that seeing or hearing our feelings in language makes us feel guilty for having expressed them at all. Opening up a cut on her arm with an "ivory-handled dinner knife" one night, Ms. O'Rourke realizes that she wants "to create some embodiment of the heartbreak eating me up." But while self-mutilation is obviously not the solution to the incommunicability of her grief, what this graphic episode illustrates is the particular experience of wanting emotions that feel too intense for language. Ms. O'Rourke finds this incident "clarifying," but leaves it to the reader to understand how grief and self-punishment relate to each other in the mind of the writer.

Ms. O'Rourke is not alone in wanting to connect grief and guilt. Just weeks after his mother's suicide, Austrian writer Peter Handke declares in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams that the worst thing for him would be sympathy: "I need the feeling that what I am going through is incomprehensible and incommunicable; only then does the horror seem meaningful and real." What moves Mr. Handke to write is an almost physiological desperation: He has experienced moments of "dull speechlessness" and needs to "formulate" them, to let the horror startle him out of insensibility and into speech, even if it contains or reduces his suffering. Ms. O'Rourke does not venture to this level of reflection on the violence involved in turning the inexpressible into something utterable.

As an act of communication that is at times resistant to the idea of communicating, The Long Goodbye is caught between two impulses: arguing that we lack a social structure for dealing with loss, and telling a story about loss that reveals a rich European and American cultural inheritance for talking about death and mourning. Ms. O'Rourke is better when telling her own story, which is itself a story of confronting a cultural lack, than when commenting directly on a "silence" that, given the plenitude of sources she cites, including Joan Didion's and Barthes' recent books, isn't as pervasive as she suggests.

While Ms. O'Rourke may argue that America's silence and uneasiness around the sadness of death makes grief an unnecessarily long and painful process for many, she is surprisingly reticent on the subject of another loss she suffers: divorce. Ms. O'Rourke and her longtime boyfriend marry shortly after her mother's diagnosis, but they separate only eight months later. "It is impossible for me to know whether--or to what degree--the separation was an expression of my grief," she writes early in the book. She dates other men before and after her mother's death, struggling to form intimacy in a time of isolation.

It is only when she sees an attractive young woman, married and with children, visiting her own dying mother in the hospital, and feels "a flicker of envy, of what-might-have-been," that she admits her loss: "Your grief is not like mine, I thought spitefully. You're going home to your family. I am newly divorced. I have no family. All I have is this." Ms. O'Rourke suffers a double loss, divorce and death, but her focus on death and her project of cultural analysis prevent her from attempting any comparison between the two kinds of loss, even though she describes both forms of attachment with the same words. By privileging death as the only real loss and treating the pain of breaking up as a mere byproduct, she misses the chance to explore the relationship between absence and loss, between social death and death itself.

Ms. O'Rourke writes passionately and intelligently about losing and feeling lost, and she argues convincingly for making mourning a more formally public process. But The Long Goodbye is split in two, a memoir trying to be cultural criticism, and cultural c
riticism excusing itself from depth in the name of individual experience. It wrenches the heart, and it raises urgent questions about death in a secular, therapeutic culture, but it leaves its fundamental assumptions about loss--how it feels, what to do about it, which kinds matter--unexamined.

"Robyn and I have been arguing about poems since we met," said Mr. Stein. "I want our poetry section to be made up of showstoppers. I don't want the poems merely to have integrity, or merely to be sophisticated-though I want those things."

Then on Tuesday, at the culture blog We Who Are About to Die, the poet Daniel Nester posted the text of an email Mr. Stein had written to a poet whose work had been accepted before he assumed the helm: "Over the last month, Robyn and I have been carefully reading the backlog of poetry that we inherited from the previous editors. This amounts to a year's worth of poems. In order to give Robyn the scope to define his own section, I regret to say, we will not be able to publish everything accepted. ... We have not found a place for your three poems, though we see much to admire in them and gave them the most serious consideration."

Holy shit is right. The poet on the receiving end of the note was not named, but Mr. Nester told the Transom that he had heard from at least three poets who had received similar notices from Mr. Stein.

"I've edited journals for 21 years," Mr. Nester told the Transom. "I've never seen anything like this. At smaller journals, there's honor among thieves. Maybe it's a corporate thing. Or they're just clueless."

Elsewhere on the Internet, poets were invited to submit poems de-accepted by The Paris Review to a new online journal called The Equalizer. "Space is unlimited," the announcement read. "If you want in, you're in."

"For good reason," Robert P. Baird, a poet and former editor of Chicago Review, told the Transom, "those of us who care about the state of poetry have developed a kind of PTSD whenever they hear words like 'shakeup.' Change, we've discovered, doesn't usually favor the poets. I'm firmly in favor of withholding judgment till we see what the new dispensation delivers, but I confess it doesn't exactly set my heart at ease to hear that the PR is backing away from poems they've already accepted."

"It's never fun cutting things," Mr. Stein told the Transom. "But an editor's job is to put out a magazine by his or her best lights, and that means you have to have discretion over what you publish."

Indeed, during the last editorial transition at The Paris Review, when Philip Gourevitch took the reins and appointed Meghan O'Rourke and Charles Simic as poetry editors, many poems accepted by the previous poetry editor, Richard Howard, were dispatched to the winds.

Dan Chiasson, who replaced Mr. Simic, a U.S. poet laureate, on the PR masthead in 2008, told Mr. Nester, "I do support Lorin and his vision for the magazine, which is why I was pleased to be asked to stay on as 'advisory' editor [along with Ms. O'Rourke]. I'll personally look for other ways that I can help the poets getting bad news-it's a top priority to make certain this work gets the recognition it deserves."

Within the insular world of American poetry, where small journals proliferate, and many burn brightly for a time, but few for as long as the six-decade-old Paris Review, the poetry editor who is not also a practicing poet is a rare thing. Thus the appointment of Mr. Creswell-who is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at N.Y.U., has published poetry criticism in The Nation and Harper's but has not pursued a career as a poet-took many poets by surprise.

"As far as writers and critics go," Mr. Nester told the Transom, "Creswell seems to be the real deal. But as far as editing a literary journal, he should have an apprentice period. I mean, how did he get this job? Did he see Lorin Stein kill a man?"

Yet historically, many distinguished poetry editors have been non-poets, among them Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe, the late Raritan editor Richard Poirier and longtime New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn, now head of the Poetry Society of America. Rob Casper of jubilat and Joanna Yas of Open City are among non-poets now prominently editing poetry today.

Rebecca Wolff, a poet and the editor of Fence, said of Mr. Creswell: "All eyes will be on him to see if he can represent the breadth of different concerns in American poetry. He could be a living example of a non-poet with a deep interest in poetry, and that's important at a time when poets seem to be the only people reading poetry."

Since leaving Farrar, Straus & Giroux to take over the quarterly from Philip Gourevitch earlier this year, Mr. Stein has been tinkering with the quarterly's design and putting together what he hopes is a "holy shit" poetry section for his first issue on September 15. "It's really hard to describe our design without comparing it to Philip's magazine," he said. The same is true of Mr. Stein's poetry desk.

In June, Mr. Stein oversaw the transition of Meghan O'Rourke and Dan Chiasson, poetry editors under Mr. Gourevitch, away from the section and brought in Robyn Creswell, who is working toward a doctorate in comparative literature at New York University. "My original background is more in poetry than in prose, so I have my own views," said Mr. Stein, who studied poetry at John Hopkins University.

"It's kind of interesting to have someone who isn't himself a poet any more than I am," Mr. Stein said. "Robyn and I have been arguing about poems since we met." 

Mr. Chiasson and Ms. O'Rourke will appear on the masthead as advisory editors. They called their new role "informal and broad-ranging" in a post announcing the masthead changes on the Review's blog. "It's more a matter of organization," Mr. Stein added. "I want somebody around who — I mean, Robyn's going to have a desk in the office."

Mr. Stein said that he did not expect to have to replace Mr. Chiasson and Ms. O'Rourke when he was interviewing with the board for his job. He said that he didn't realize the extent to which they had other things on their plate. Both are critics, and she is a poet. "Meghan and Dan both are super. There are many good claims on their time," he said. "They warned me about this before it was clear to me — in a very friendly way."

Mr. Stein has been taking a hands-on approach to selecting which works will appear in his first issue. "Philip had two poetry editors so that they could be checks and balances against each other," Mr. Stein said. "The geometry starts getting pretty wobbly when there's three of you and you're talking on the phone." Mr. Stein said that he inherited a year's backlog of submissions, which Ms. O'Rourke and Mr. Chiasson already had opinions on.

"I want our poetry section to be made up of show-stoppers. I don't want the poems merely to have integrity, or merely to be sophisticated — though I want those things," he said. Mr. Stein made an example of an Elizabeth Bishop poem ("Keaton") that he tore out of The New Yorker and pinned above his desk. "Every time I looked at it, my eyes would fill up with tears," he said.

For now, he is done moving people around. "Well, I did have a little fender-bender with my bicycle yesterday," he said, "but no changes to the masthead today." Those damn sixth avenue cabs! "The taxi sort of took out my front wheel. Unless something happens to one of us — which heaven forbid — I think we've got our team."

Mr. Stein brought on Charlotte Strick, who designed books with him at FSG, to work on his redesign. They will stick with the same height and overall look that Mr. Gourevitch employed as editor. It will still be "tall, slim," he said. "In general when you see these literary magazines today, they seem sort of apologetic. They've all kind of become wider." Mr. Stein prefers a shorter line, a skinnier page. Mr. Stein also prefers paper.

"I don't know if we need an app," he said. "It's a good question, I mean, a whole app? What do you think?"

"I don't want to ever, ever not be mainly a paper," Mr. Stein continued. "That's what the board and the old hands tend to call The Paris Review — 'the paper.'"

Mr. Stein said he had been looking for ideas about the new design in old issues of the Review from the '50s, the days of George Plimpton. "It's very improvised. I love the way it's improvised," said Mr. Stein. He noticed that the press would sometimes run out of type and change fonts in the middle of an issue. He wasn't planning to do anything like that. But, he added, "I know we'll play."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post stated that Mr. Stein's redesign will not affect the size of the quarterly. His first issue will be the same height as Mr. Gourevitch's last issue, but narrower.