For the children of immigrants to America, seeing their parents become citizens can open an envelope full of mixed feelings. The speaker of Camilo Loaiza Bonilla’s poem, in “Loose & flawed Spanglish,” relays congratulations from Barack Obama to his mother…
In a poem comprised of couplets interrupted by one tercet, Ava Chen plumbs the depths of a desire which has inflated beyond the bounds of its relationship of origin. Chen captures this inflation through both the poem’s imagery—”a mouth with…breath…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Dr. Joshua Bennett, whose first collection, The Sobbing School, was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back…
The places we call home are not always the most welcoming, just as the places we go to get clean are among the dirtiest, as Claire Maracle says in these two poems. In their origin story, Maracle outlines a mother…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Matthew Olzmann, our guest judge for this year’s Myths & Fables Prize, which you can submit to here. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections,…
When thinking of your grandparents, what scene arises in the mind? For Raine Bongon, there are two places: “the house with the pomelo tree” and “a farm in nueva ecija / where it always smelled like smoke.” Pomelos and gold…
CP Nwankwo’s poem takes the ancient biblical myth of Eve and gives her a new song to sing. Instead of the fall of mankind being something that happened to Eve, in this telling, she chooses knowledge and wisdom and to…
What might catch one’s attention immediately in “Yang Gui-Fei Fresh Off Potomac Avenue” is the bold persona and distinct voice captured in its lines. While Yang Gui-Fei lived and died hundreds of years ago, she speaks anew with a modern,…
Visiting the doctor for a biopsy is often, inherently, a disorienting experience. Ron Riekki explores a compounding disorientation—impacted by PTSD and flashbacks—where doctors’ voices become anchor points for the poem’s speaker. In “They cut off part of my lip today…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Julia Alvarez, who has returned to her “first love”—poetry—with her new collection, Visitations. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes.…
