Palavi Ahuja’s poem is about far more than “a sleeve of Parle-G biscuits,” although it’s a thoroughly intriguing place to begin the careful weaving the poem accomplishes. The poem’s strands include the watching and relaying the narrative of the movie…
One particular area of genius in Ridwan Fasasi’s poem “Millennials after the banishment” resides in its details — in particular, line breaks and ends of lines. The ending words receive emphasis and, when read in succession, even have a coherence…
Here, Lindsay Li takes the art form of a picture carved on three panels hinged together and applies it to written work. The three condensed, columnar moments hinge upon the hypothetical death of the speaker’s “evil mother.” In the first,…
Home finds itself to be a place of both discord and potential in Blessing Omeiza Ojo’s poem, with the poem’s narrative pieces lying locked within the repetition of the word “slaughterhouse.” The word itself carries both violence — “slaughter” —…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Sean Hill, the Guest Judge of our poetry prize which will have winners announced this month. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out…
What better way to navigate anxiety or insomnia, or a combination of both, than a flowchart? We find the experimental form of this poem forces us to sit with the language of it, which is fractured yet interwoven. Two tributaries…
“Escape From the Filth Room” is both dreamlike and nightmarish, blurring images of consuming insects and slurping ooze with a vision of God. Particularly arresting moments come in the second and third stanzas’ turns, where the direct address calls readers…
Making the mundane suddenly surreal, Caleb Wolfson-Seeley links seemingly disparate moments, from a cat’s skeleton to burnt toast, in “And the tulips didn’t bloom this year.” Each stanza makes those links linguistically literal through the beginning “and” — a conjunction…
Ziyuan Tang attempts some pretty ambitious maneuvers in “To My Very Catholic Father.” Most poems about poems can stray toward the pedantic or else they’re academic, self-referential, and stodgy, but Tang is neither; the meticulous repetition and slick wordplay sometimes…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with poet María Auxiliadora Álvarez. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From her early writing to her most recent collection,…
