Divyasri Krishnan’s “Ars Poetica” perfectly balances the pastoral image of a flighty canary with the urban one of languishing on a train. These two central scenes build a sense of tension, an ode to liminal life spaces– to the “beauty…
It might be nostalgia, it might be the winter world around us, but we’re desperate for this poem of summer by Winshen Liu. In the midst of wherever you may be, let her latest poem sun your head and fill…
Pamilerin Jacob is a poet of density, imagery stacked and tactile and bouncing into your ankles—their latest, “STUDYING THE WORLD,” gives to us a speaker wrestling with understanding itself, seeking the joy of knowing without the burden of outcome. STUDYING THE…
Weijia Pan’s latest work wrestles with the moon like a monk wrestles with prayer. It asks in the moonlight: what poet has not translated?—has not archived and assimilated?—has not turned a poem’s ending silence into their fitfully aspirant beginning? Betrayal:…
A meditation on a fruit that opens into defiance against the pressure to assimilate, this poem by Kandala Singh is unflinching both in its beauty and in its reverence for its speaker’s background and belonging. Narangi I roll my eyes…
It’s difficult to make myths new, but Gustav Parker Hibbett’s haunting interpretation of Ariadne’s longing for escape does just that, offering a complex and elegant glimpse into the at-first fresh, and then nagging and expansive impulse to “set out.” Ariadne…
Exploring conversations around race and erasure through the framework of the poem’s title object, Teja Sudhakar writes a scathing and striking lament and a plea to “keep your eyes soft,” to see first the “veil” and then through it. punctum…
Hello, everyone! And happy early Halloween. When this is published, I’ll probably be traveling already –– I have two back-to-back academic conferences from the end of this month to the beginning of November, and am particularly excited to have the…
M. Ezra Zhang takes us an exquisite and strange journey in which swallows hold trouts in their beaks. This poem, in a turn eventually unifying the you and the child of memory, portrays a relationship that evolves over time and…
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts:…
