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…
Through tonally complex and innovative language, deftness of line, and vivid, intimate imagery, Kisten Holt-Browning’s two poems push the reader into a liminal space between the familiar and the unknown: “Shifted… toward mysteries”—an essential work of poetry which aims to…
Rachel Mann Smith wants to see, wants us to see, the women whose value is so often treated as a joke: “the joke is us dying / in art like we do in life.” In tight, energetic couplets, the poem…
Daniel Duffy’s “Cherry Blossoms” reveals the power of a single scene: how one moment, shared between two individuals, can carry so much the weight of love, despair, disgust, and the way we so often hide the most normal means of…
“Daughters” seeks to ask of happiness its place, its time, its purpose—Alexis Sears rides her poem through a cascade of softly touching subjects with the ease of a long downhill road, coming to rest in an a field of evergreen.…
