Jacob Boyd writes a sharp, semi-ekphrastic poem that addresses love alongside mental health struggle, sandwiched between the present and a memory. With the rhythm of song, this poem in couplets turns lyrics and idioms inside out and into surprising glimpses…
A primary mission of Frontier is to provide high quality resources and practical help for serious poets—so we’ve been reaching out to poetry professors to help give clarity to this strange journey and stranger craft. This month, we got the…
This poem flows across even its absences, emphasized in caesura. Sodïq Oyèkànmí writes into transformation with the echoes of the past and the fears of the future joining into a request for togetherness. i am becoming more & more like…
Animated by its speaker’s distinct voice, this poem by Samia Saliba catalogues feelings of alienation that eventually draw us into a moment of ekphrastic revelation. at the lakeshore trader joe’s they were playing the x files theme song & i…
Hello, everyone! Cavar here, to bring you my second entry into the Exceptional Poetry archives (find the first one here, in case you missed it) I’m here to bring you four more poems (well…in this case, more than four; you’ll…
Alight with a sense of intergenerational connection, Arah Ko’s “Catching” enters its speaker’s childhood and expands into a pursuit of a family history—“a long line of flame-mongers”—and resistances. Moving the reader through sharply woven couplets that blend past and present,…
Timelessly elegiac, “Gabriel” threads the speaker’s current moment of mourning and reflection alongside a direct address to the poem’s namesake, generating a wrenching and veiled portrait of both the dead and the bereaved’s unresolvable struggle with suffering. Gabriel It will…
Gaia Rajan’s “Essay on Class” reveals its speaker’s personal exploration of the relationship between wealth and the accessibility of beautiful things. We love this poem in part for its tone, which is quietly measured, and the contrast this has with…
Hello, everyone! I’m Cavar, Frontier’s new associate editor. I’m excited to be taking over Frontier’s Exceptional Poetry column, and can’t wait to share some of my favorite poem-finds with you. For the last few years, I’ve published a Substack with…
Through the surprising yet poignant frame of learning “which language hope is most fluent in,” Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s poem brings the reader into the speaker’s fear in the midst of health crisis. This poem works its magic in part by juxtaposing…
