Kay Kassirer’s “golden shovel after my mother’s affidavit for medical assistance in dying,” is not an easy poem. It’s a difficult poem to consider but that’s why it’s important. Kassirer isn’t pretending that the ugly parts of inequality don’t exist…
The surreal nature and repetitive language in Lisa L. Moore’s “Begin Again,” echoes the desperation that many marginalized communities feel in this current moment. The repeating sonic element of “Let me,” asks for a permission in a way that many…
Sheree La Puma’s poem, “She Introduces Herself As Katie,” has a physicality to its weird music, a kind of pulsing rhythm that immediately evokes the body and its sometimes conflicting desires. Ambiguity and tension are hard at work in this…
There’s a surreal element to Zephyr Zhang’s “Object Permanence.” The poem begins somewhat innocuously with, “I am a lock,” but quickly it escalates to, “I am an insecure lock.” Zhang drags us into their emotional world without permission, and while…
Chris Dahl’s “Seventeen,” is sensuous, the kind of luxuriating poem that takes its time as it unwinds, carrying the reader through a journey that ends in a kind of time capsule of youth, beauty, nostalgia and dreamy remembering—for both author…
Jayne Marek’s “Listening for Otters,” has a restrained quality, a sense that we as readers don’t have all the information. But it’s precisely this kind of withholding that draws us into the poem. The writing is tightly controlled and sparse,…
Courtney DuChene’s poem, “What My Grandmother Nestles in the Earth,” evokes a tension between the bursts of color that she evokes in the poem using floral imagery, and the fragility of human bodies and minds, focusing in particular on memory.…
Ruby Maghoney invites us into a suddenly visceral space with the image of squeezing the tangerine, but then quickly pivots, pressing us as readers to juxtapose this deeply physical and intimate image with an immediate pivot to implications of loss…
Jeremy Karn’s work in “first winter in iowa city,” initially feels tentative, as this speaker navigates the boundaries of this new relationship and the boundaries of intimacy and culture that seem to fluctuate between speaker and subject, but by the…
In Sharon Zhang’s “Last Date,” her speaker encounters love from all angles, in a sly merging of pregaming and praxis. The writing is quick and energetic, but Zhang’s fresh voice isn’t flip or glib; rather this speaker is quite rigorous…
