Grace H. Zhou’s “magical dark” exists on the tension between the fairy tales we tell ourselves and the truth of how we treat our most vulnerable—”truth is a screw in the wood / of time,” she says, and she means…
Perry Janes reaches right into our technology-soaked bodies and unearths the flesh that aches for air, the “Fat tumor blooming below the shoulder/ that I kiss to keep well-loved / and benign.” A scroll, a techno-consummation manifesto lit by hundreds of individual…
We’re all aching for a poem of transformation to wash over the world—may Megan Bontrager’s “MAJOR ARCANA IN THE AUTHUMN-DARK” be it’s guide and proclaimer. MAJOR ARCANA IN THE AUTUMN-DARK …
Jonathan Andrew Pérez’s lates is a poem for “another hot summer.” With prophetic spirit, “When They Come as They Must” delivers a rallying call for the seething, the unheard. I Can’t Breathe: When They Come As They Must When they…
Sibling love poems feel like a balm for the 2020 soul. Lannie Stabile’s “On Pennsylvania Road” is a fresh splash of intimacy to cool our burning brows: unafraid of sentimentality, unalloyed by irony. On Pennsylvania Road …
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…
