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…
“The moon has no need for your poetry,” Ben Cooper says, and he’s right. Sometimes we have to hear difficult truths, difficult versions of the truth. But in his poem, “What Words Do I Not Yet Have,” Cooper doesn’t look…
Mark Hernberg knows how to tug on the heartstrings. Literally. In his poem, “I Was Reading a Scientific Article,” he moves from the metaphor into the metaphysical in just a few lines, his speaker deftly illustrating to the reader the…
Michelle Moroses makes a powerful statement in her poem, “jeopardy people,” when she writes, “the ugliness will not stay inside of you forever. eventually it is going to let itself out…” This kind of statement likely resonates with many people,…
