Alight with a sense of intergenerational connection, Arah Ko’s “Catching” enters its speaker’s childhood and expands into a pursuit of a family history—“a long line of flame-mongers”—and resistances. Moving the reader through sharply woven couplets that blend past and present,…
Please join us in congratulating Kathryn Hargett-Hsu, winner of the 2023 Frontier Breakthrough Chapbook Contest. Hargett-Hsu’s manuscript was selected by Kemi Alabi and will be published in spring 2024. And congratulations to our outstanding finalists and longlisters! We’re confident we’ll…
Timelessly elegiac, “Gabriel” threads the speaker’s current moment of mourning and reflection alongside a direct address to the poem’s namesake, generating a wrenching and veiled portrait of both the dead and the bereaved’s unresolvable struggle with suffering. Gabriel It will…
Gaia Rajan’s “Essay on Class” reveals its speaker’s personal exploration of the relationship between wealth and the accessibility of beautiful things. We love this poem in part for its tone, which is quietly measured, and the contrast this has with…
Through the surprising yet poignant frame of learning “which language hope is most fluent in,” Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s poem brings the reader into the speaker’s fear in the midst of health crisis. This poem works its magic in part by juxtaposing…
Constantly turning, this brief poem celebrates the fullness of desire between partners who are together in their disparate roles. “Nongestational” is a lesson in the power of each individual word to shape a poem, from the title to the final,…
A poem foregrounding the distance between our ability to describe and a thing in itself, Cindy King’s “Noumenon” is a whirling syntactical search. Absence, which emerges in the final lines, becomes the catalyst for the question of what was it…
We often wonder, what are fresh and engaging ways to approach the lush tradition of love poetry? Xueyi Zhou’s poem is a gorgeous example of this—unexpected, driven by a compelling voice and constant, charged turns. Love Poem by a Cynic…
Lyric and sharp, this is poem drives home the importance of considering the relationship between form and content. Visibly contained yet multiplying language within its own confines, Sher Ting Chim’s triptych trains an unflinching eye on the power-enforced distances between…
Stranging moments of romantic intimacies and distances, Gabrielle Grace Hogan brings us a poem full of unmirrored longings contained by the domestic image yet entirely new, given to the reader in unexpected renderings of the everyday. Devotion In the kitchen,…
