Kendra Allen’s new poem crackles with the energy of language on edge, language in transformation. Without irony or posturing, “Your Name Was Supposed to Be Africa” explores the complicated layering of identity across names and bodies and continents. YOUR…
“The Wound in Drag” is a manifesto of youth—troubled, hopeful, full of phones and wounds and love. Tallon Kennedy cascades their self—wounded, aching—across the four parts, landing finally, perhaps precariously, on the dance floor. The Wound in Drag I.…
Jesse DeLong writes of a time seemingly eras ago—when black children saw one of their own in the Oval Office, when pigments and not political terrorism were the musings of philosophy professors. The vulnerability of “The Exit Ramps” returns us…
Grace Lau’s “Yuhua Hamasaki” arrives at just the right moment—with power, with vitality, with dragulous charm. The poem crunches your expectations of womanhood, of Chinese womanhood, and invites you to a feast of new realities. WHEN YUHUA HAMASAKI WENT…
We love how José del Valle’s “The Opposite of a Great Truth Is Also True” compresses some of the biggest beliefs of the day into small marbles of imagery, rolled out across the lines. Time is squeezed, the past is…
Aurora Masum-Javed’s “singularity” has been selected as third place in the Summer Poetry Award because the work meditates profoundly on the vulnerability of being a daughter, of being someone else’s dream, of being a body, frail and falling through time.…
Leila Chatti’s poem on the perennial politics of sex and power has won 2nd place in the Summer Poetry Award. “After Reading…” exemplifies some of the best poetic-moves that today’s poets enjoy making: the collision of pop culture inanity with…
“Louisiana Requiem” hangs itself on your heart like Spanish moss. The poem expands with grace, like a full womb, from the first line to the last. Heather Treseler has earned the $2000 prize and Summer Poetry Award, because this poem,…
Gabriel Seals writes delicately of family, of houses and siblings and parents. “The last, the only” layers gentle loneliness on the soft threads of relationships, on the “naked masses” of our familial hopes and losses—asking, where is home? the last,…
Alyssa Quinn’s poem kaleidoscopes from a birds-eye view the earth, the cracking white earth of the salt flats. With fluid grace, the poem moves from the grass and ground to geometric ideals, so that the reader holds both in their…
