Eric Stiefel’s gently mystical “I Mean for a Thing to Be Other” explores loss with the same curiosity and eagerness as a tongue investigating a missing tooth. Who has not felt the pull toward the torn edges of absence, even…
Congratulations to Frederick Speers, winner of the 2020 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest, selected by Carl Phillips, and a sincere thanks to everyone who submitted. Thank you, also, for your patience while we reviewed all the extraordinary work this year. We’ll…
Anthony Okpunor faithfully leaps into the wellspring of trauma with “Something in the Air Wants us too Much”—a wellspring where the rules of reality break down. Yet, from that trauma, from that disorder, Okpunor has gathered a surreal web of…
“Lately,” JB Stone writes, joy “can be a chore to maintain.” Stone’s new poem meets us all where we are today, an Ode to the precipice of an unexpected reality and our anxious struggle to jog the new path. …
Maya Mahmud’s “Faith is Tonal” is an epic miniaturized: a mystical performance of music in language, in our bodies, in the flights of birds shining like facets of one great gem. Loosen your grip and fall into the spinning sound—let…
A poem for your body, Brittny Ray Crowell’s “How to Play Dead (Again)” invites you to perform power over the power of death itself (employed as it is by the racial caste system to kill in infinite ways and leave…
Lynn Wang’s new poem menaces your faith, your homebound security—”Swallow” is a tight work of sincere doubt, angling in its accusations and tight little lines for some fair and true sense of “inviolability.” SWALLOW It is not the prey…
“Twenty One” by Jazelle Jajeh is a rich, associative exploration of self—of mirrors reaching into the “corridor of me.” The prose poem form holds so well the desire, the obsession, as each rubber-banding leap of conscious loops across the right…
Audra Puchalski’s new poem aims direct at an ultimate concern: who is coming to save us? For “The Fungus, the Fruit, and the Apex Predator,” the answer is not what you expect—more toothy than merciful. The Fungus, the Fruit,…
David Mohan’s “Arrangement in Red and Gold” explores the art of remembering, of what remains in elegy for the parent “horizontal” and now gone. “lush by light,” the speaker declares—or at least, hopes—in reflection. Arrangement in Red and Gold, Number…
