For the children of immigrants to America, seeing their parents become citizens can open an envelope full of mixed feelings. The speaker of Camilo Loaiza Bonilla’s poem, in “Loose & flawed Spanglish,” relays congratulations from Barack Obama to his mother…
In a poem comprised of couplets interrupted by one tercet, Ava Chen plumbs the depths of a desire which has inflated beyond the bounds of its relationship of origin. Chen captures this inflation through both the poem’s imagery—”a mouth with…breath…
In “Parasitic Haibun” by Amanda Nicole Corbin, they invoke apocalyptic language to create a complex depiction of love, infidelity, desire, and secrecy. The speaker engages in “greedy-freedom.” Amidst the murderous heat, growling air, and blood-letting mosquitos, the lovers in the…
In “Living Room Lessons,” Nirvana Shahriar moves through a smoke-hazed, searching consciousness where family, memory, and politics begin to blur into one another. Cigarette ash, cardamom tea, a grandmother’s body, a father’s music, and a photograph of Paul McCartney in…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Dr. Joshua Bennett, whose first collection, The Sobbing School, was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back…
In “Carol says she’ll name a lizard after me and feed him superworms,” the speaker moves through questions of form, faith, memory, and selfhood, becoming increasingly unsure where one ends and the other begins. “To name is to become,” they…
In “Offshore, I Don’t Kiss Anybody,” Tong collapses the space between the swirling vapor world of the fish pond and her pondering. To kiss or to not kiss this fishboy. The subject circles the answer until finally coming to a…
Have you been leafing through your poems, thinking some of them are ready to be published? Consider sending your poems out to these contests and publications. Several of them come with added bonuses for submitting your work, like a free…
We’re thrilled to congratulate Amanda Nicole Corbin, the winner of Frontier Poetry’s 2026 Frontier OPEN! Her poem “Parasitic Haibun,” was selected by our editorial team as the first place winner. Our reading team was over-joyed by the creativity, experimentation, and…
The places we call home are not always the most welcoming, just as the places we go to get clean are among the dirtiest, as Claire Maracle says in these two poems. In their origin story, Maracle outlines a mother…
