Featured Poetry

Owen McLeod here delivers a poem both playful and sinister—a carnival mirror that shoves back uncomfortable truths in its twisting reflection. The hashtags and the copyrights give “Three Moments…” a certain childishness, like a drawing a kid would make for…

Today is the day! Proud to present Kirk Schlueter’s wrenching “The Anorexic’s Aubade,” selected by Victoria Chang for the $3000 prize. The poem is tender—medium rare—haunting like an empty stomach, and speaks in a voice like prayer across a handful…

We’re all very excited to share with you the winners of the 2018 Award for New Poets, selected by Victoria Chang. Today, we’re continuing with our second place winner, “Heart postpartum” by Cara Waterfall—wherein so much relies on the heart…

We’re all very excited to share with you the winners of the 2018 Award for New Poets, selected by Victoria Chang. Today, we have “Self-Portrait No. 5” by Cynthia Manick—a lovely poem of birds and bellies and the inevitable struggle…

The past can be a plague, an ever-present intrusion of darkness—Shapiro walks us into the shadow sweetly here, carefully with image and enjambment and long, rolling sentences. A family wakes together on a weekday: the father, the mother and daughters,…

Aline Dolinh’s writing physically invigorates—all that imagery of teeth and blood and mouths over-full. It’s a powerful invitation: to lean your reader body through the mirror of the poem and into its luminous space, dark and bloody as it is.…

It’s no secret that the literary world has baked-in institutional obstacles and biases, and our fellowships, like all we do, are intended as an effort to break those barriers. We are honored to share with you all two poems by our…

Katherine Indermaurs series of triplets flex a considered and deliberate rhythm—let the syntax carry your reading into your body, the pauses and the rushing forward, the flooding of your sense of balance. Her poem meditates on grief and loss, the…

With”at the request of angels,” Kesi Kmt folds language and dialect and dream into a song on growing up and the fire that comes. Every choice serves her speaker—the apocolyptic imagery and the strong, familial dialect—revealed powerfully, surprisingly in the…

Elisávet Makridis delivers a technical scorcher, a palindrome that shifts and moves with precision. The mirrored stanzas deliver surprise, though you’ve already read them, fresh emotion, though you already know the story. “Propulsion” is a compact mirror to the face…