Claire Eder sets the stage in “Anniversary” for “ordinary love”—a performance both endearing and familiar. Whose body has not been softened by illegal chemicals? Or trembled by illicit confession? Or soaked in the long river of “ordinary love?” Anniversary…
“Not Evening Now”—a poem of memory and the wet Florida air—is true joy in the mouth. Sound puts the meat on imagery, on memory, and Henry Brooks has invited us to feast in his night gazebo. Not Evening Now…
Poetry has always endeavored to create a space where land and body can reveal their unity, political and otherwise—Isabel Acevedo’s poem swims in this tradition. With “May 2018, Puerto Rico,” she’s invited us into that very specific pain of May…
Andrew Mobbs here reveals that uncomfortable truth: violence is seductive. A poem of war and explosion and desert, “Mirage” lingers beyond the edges of traditional combat poetry to deliver the experience and mind of today’s newly defined wars. Mirage…
Sallie Fullerton glides her words into the readers body, that the thing of flesh may be escaped, walked away from. “Four times over” is more than an exploration of what the body is for—the poem interrogates what the body is,…
The truth of the apocalypse is that our language will die with us—what if words, this dark future asks, are neither immortal nor inevitable? Margaret Ray here explores the edges of this question with both the awe and fear that…
Originally published in 2017, this essay from our editor examines the previous year’s hit collections, Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, and Portrait of an Alcoholic by Kaveh Akbar—and we’re so excited that both Kaveh and Ocean will be helping to…
This “letter to the editor” struggles earnestly to say what it can’t and not what it does—to not talk about race, or tribe, or ethnicity is still to talk about it. tokorima, a Master Artisan in the Art of Māori Carving,…
What is need? What is loneliness? Marlin Figgins investigates, discovering unexpected images and new questions along the journey: see his world of muddy bellies, his moon dangling tethers of want like arms of a jellyfish. “If What I’m Told is…
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a shoes can serve as such luminous tissue between cultures—here, Nene Giorgadze, a Georgian poet, covers them with sperm, with desire, with silence and nostalgia. “High Heels” is both an ode and a surrender,…