I always crave poems that surprise me. But entering into a new year and in the midst of some life transitions, I’ve found this to be extra true. I want to spend time with poems that shock me out of…
Timi Sanni’s poem, like the mother it portrays, does not flinch from darkness, even in its musicality. The “we” who speaks insists the reader follow them into the observation of this unbearable moment and learn something difficult about love and…
What simpler purpose could poetry serve? To reach out, with love, to those we are losing, have lost, will lose? With grace, with love—for us as much as herself, Ajanae Dawkins has written a poem we are all afraid to…
“There’s so much negative space / in this room, Ma,” laments the speaker in Samantha Hsiung’s “Tank Man Before Execution,” then proceeds to deftly complicate the negative space of the poem. In a lyric reimagining both elegiac and defiant, this…
This poem by Shannan Mann has grief fifteen times. A ghazal, an epic, a gift, a woman’s own yawp, “In Grief” searches—like a scalpel searches—the space of grief for both joy and terror, rest and violence. In Grief Men of…
“I’m still in half-/sleep,” Dare Williams writes—an invitation, to you, into a shared dream / shared page. Like dreams, Dare’s poem asserts, poetry is a place to rewrite our own history, to tell our own story, our way. In My…
At Frontier, we’ve been compelled by the relationship of poetry and the sensation of roots—how do experiences that connect us to the deep past make us whole as humans? Zoe Kimone’s “My Garden” is a brief and beautiful exploration of that…
Mayowa Oyewale seeks out the roots, through language, of connection and disconnection. “Fine forgetfulness,” the poem calls it, the state of a tongue transformed, making room for new words to share its mouth. Why Do You Answer in Yoruba III…
Some poems wade in with the tide, some pour down your scalp like oil—”Sundays” throws fistfuls of paint, covers you in heated stones. Megan Nichols has made every square inch of language a lever and a weight, a clockwork machine…
Jae Nichelle has made a poem that does what a poem ought to do: stuff the barrel, place a stack of words and truth between the bullet and its target. Terrance Hayes describes the rules behind the Golden Shovel’s structure…
