We love the daring of a condensed poem, and Meghan Kemp-Gee’s “A Bird in Blue” is condensed yet complex. Its sharp turns convey transformation, opening a world inside its ten lines. A Bird in Blue On the wire, one says,…
Inviting us into an anthem toward abundance, Aida Bardissi writes with unmatched lushness. “revolutionary recipe” is a slow feast, asking us to consider love and all the defiant ways it might nourish and sustain us, with “one fist in air,…
Some poems haunt us with images, demanding to be remembered. Sophia Liu’s poem, though only the length of a sonnet, lingers and lingers, and in doing so demands remembrance for the Atlanta shooting victims for which it is named. “I…
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…
