Constantly turning, this brief poem celebrates the fullness of desire between partners who are together in their disparate roles. “Nongestational” is a lesson in the power of each individual word to shape a poem, from the title to the final,…
A poem foregrounding the distance between our ability to describe and a thing in itself, Cindy King’s “Noumenon” is a whirling syntactical search. Absence, which emerges in the final lines, becomes the catalyst for the question of what was it…
We often wonder, what are fresh and engaging ways to approach the lush tradition of love poetry? Xueyi Zhou’s poem is a gorgeous example of this—unexpected, driven by a compelling voice and constant, charged turns. Love Poem by a Cynic…
Lyric and sharp, this is poem drives home the importance of considering the relationship between form and content. Visibly contained yet multiplying language within its own confines, Sher Ting Chim’s triptych trains an unflinching eye on the power-enforced distances between…
Stranging moments of romantic intimacies and distances, Gabrielle Grace Hogan brings us a poem full of unmirrored longings contained by the domestic image yet entirely new, given to the reader in unexpected renderings of the everyday. Devotion In the kitchen,…
A portrait of a grief observed, Alexandria Peterson’s new poem reminds us of the power of the carefully-attended-to image that overflows the space of a moment. Through the detailing of simple actions, the reader receives the weight of the speaker’s…
In Matthew Tuckner’s elegy, the poem becomes a microcosm of the world and writing the urgent act of capturing “the many things / I don’t want you to miss,” the precision of its speaker’s language laden with the highest stakes.…
Sonya Lara evokes a lush, quiet moment at the edge of a desire almost–but not quite–uttered. Opening from scene into meditation, this poem is one in which every movement is felt, flowing like water from one image to the next.…
We get so excited over poems that really lean into their own forms, and Alexa Luborsky’s “Image Map” does just that. In an endless loop of stanzas mapped against visual object, the speaker’s strange and striking metaphors examine interpretation in…
A poem that in its concision sings hope against “the bane” of burdening histories, Samuel A. Betiku’s aubade claims tomorrow as a place not just of survival, but beyond it into “blossoming.” Aubade with Tomorrow This is the bane: history…
