When thinking of your grandparents, what scene arises in the mind? For Raine Bongon, there are two places: “the house with the pomelo tree” and “a farm in nueva ecija / where it always smelled like smoke.” Pomelos and gold…
The moment is finally here! We’ve read innumerable manuscripts, combed through dozens of individual poems, cried, laughed, agonized, and celebrated—all while adhering to our temporary pledge of sworn secrecy—to bring you the winner of the 2026 Debut Chapbook Prize. The…
CP Nwankwo’s poem takes the ancient biblical myth of Eve and gives her a new song to sing. Instead of the fall of mankind being something that happened to Eve, in this telling, she chooses knowledge and wisdom and to…
What might catch one’s attention immediately in “Yang Gui-Fei Fresh Off Potomac Avenue” is the bold persona and distinct voice captured in its lines. While Yang Gui-Fei lived and died hundreds of years ago, she speaks anew with a modern,…
Visiting the doctor for a biopsy is often, inherently, a disorienting experience. Ron Riekki explores a compounding disorientation—impacted by PTSD and flashbacks—where doctors’ voices become anchor points for the poem’s speaker. In “They cut off part of my lip today…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Julia Alvarez, who has returned to her “first love”—poetry—with her new collection, Visitations. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes.…
Abecedarians require precision in order to make their arrangement of alphabetical beginning letters sing lyrically, a feat which Ali Choudhary’s poem about brutish men accomplishes without diminishing its message. In fact, this arrangement brings new light to the biblical language—to…
Under the surface of everyday life, each of us has perhaps a few impressions from where our clothes dig in, or a few marks from bug bites—secret maps which tell where we’ve been. This under-layer—below the exterior yet still on…
Watching your love leave when you know their home is far from yours is particularly painful, but the moments before their leaving are truly something to be worshiped. Cole Pragides “Aubade For Long Distance” praises the lover’s closeness in images…
Lavanya Arora’s poems are perfect examples of how much place and description can ground a reader in the speaker’s world, and even within a speaker’s family lineage. What makes certain descriptors so enchanting is their contrast and saturation—river water in…
