Congratulations to our winner, Xiao Yue Shan! Thank you to all the finalists and submitters for making this such a beautifully difficult choice this year. “How Often I Have Chosen Love” by Xiao Yue Shan Xiao Yue Shan’s…
Congratulations to the finalists of the 2018 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest and an enormous thanks to everyone who submitted. We saw an incredible number of submissions and the quality of writing was extraordinary. Thank you, also, for your patience while…
As Reeman’s title suggests, “IN BOSTON” travels the unsorted emotions of modern romance—& reports back ambivalence, saturated bodies, solo cups. The poem weaves tenderness and despair into every couplet, until we end up like the speaker, “suspended” between the two.…
Rachel Mindell explores the suggestive power of meat here—plugging the poem in to a word, an image, an experience as basic and ancient as breathing. “This is eating,” the poem declares with a wink—because it’s more than that. Just look…
J.L. Wall crystallizes here a dark passion on the bud of existential doubt—his poem, “Counting the Omer,” is a deeply familiar why God in the face of inexplicable tragedy, turning softly on Wall’s fresh imagery and sincere ambivalence. Counting the Omer…
Poetry has a way of elevating character profiles into something more, and Zilka Joseph’s clear, relatable narrative here does just that. “The Suburban Car Dealership Shuttle Driver” is both a person we know and an experience we’ve had; his hard…
LaGrone’s “Arko” elapses within a single sentence, tucking moons and bones and love into its nine couplets. The poem gathers its imagery on the backs of short, delicate three and four syllable lines—a fragility that LaGrone bears with envious ease.…
Taiye lands this poem in the delicate spot between bodies and dreams—a primal response can’t be helped against the throaty “leaves”, the “claws” of death and drowning. The reader wakes from Taiye’s “Dream” with their whole day changed. I…
Bales packages her frank questioning here with untamed energy and honesty. “Questions” crafts a strange comfort in the face of death—precisely—as its title suggests—because the poem does not gesture at hollow answers, but wrestles with humor and charm the incredible…
For “Close,” Wesner generates—with the smallest lines she could—the broad ambiguity we have toward our bodies, our parents, our thinking. So many powerful punches land between these two-three word lines; these sentence long stanzas fight above their weight. Close…
