Featured Poetry

Poetry: WHEN YUHUA HAMASAKI WENT HOME by Grace Lau

By Grace Lau | October 19, 2018

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…

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Poetry: THE OPPOSITE OF A GREAT TRUTH IS ALSO TRUE by José del Valle

By José del Valle | October 12, 2018

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…

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Summer Poetry Award 3rd Place: Singularity by Aurora Masum-Javed

By Aurora Masum-Javed | October 11, 2018

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.…

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Summer Poetry Award 2nd Place: After Reading DJ Khaled Will Not Perform Oral Sex On His Wife… by Leila Chatti

By Leila Chatti | October 10, 2018

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…

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Summer Poetry Award Winner: Louisiana Requiem by Heather Treseler

By Heather Treseler | October 9, 2018

“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,…

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Poetry: the last, the only by Gabriel Seals

By Gabriel Seals | October 5, 2018

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,…

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Poetry: Naming the Salt Flats by Alyssa Quinn

By Alyssa Quinn | September 28, 2018

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…

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Poetry: Reaching Into the Bottom of My Breath by Sam Pittman

By Sam Pittman | September 21, 2018

Sonnets are the perennial form because within the fourteen lines is a universe of choices. Sam Pittman’s new poem makes these choices with grace, guiding the reader’s breath with such maturity that the final couplet easily takes it away.  …

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Poetry: Glitter Ode by Andrew Hemmert

By Andrew Hemmert | September 14, 2018

“Glitter Ode” struts through a exuberant associative landscape, with glitter—marvelously annoying and excessive—as anchor, as compass. Hemmert’s poem has got us on our feet, wiggling, turning our hips and shoulders and feet, looking for the shine.   Glitter Ode  …

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Poetry: Corporal by Shane Chergosky

By Shane Chergosky | September 7, 2018

Our editors love the way Shane Chergosky’s poem generates an authentic and gothic setting out of the skate park—the empty cans, the suggestion of infinity, and that sick, bleeding sky. “Corporal” exceeds itself and its deliberately banal details wonderfully at…

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