First, a sincere thank you to all the finalists for partnering with us. It’s such an honor to celebrate your poems. You can find Yi Wei’s winning poem here. For Part 1, we’re sharing work by Grace MacNair, jason b.…
Join us in celebrating this poem by Yi Wei, winner of the 2022 Frontier OPEN! Questioning language and the poem itself–through intimacies, questions of race, power, and perception, and the syntaxes of everyday life in the speaker’s community–“Diction” is a…
Some poems haunt us with images, demanding to be remembered. Sophia Liu’s poem, though only the length of a sonnet, lingers and lingers, and in doing so demands remembrance for the Atlanta shooting victims for which it is named. “I…
I always crave poems that surprise me. But entering into a new year and in the midst of some life transitions, I’ve found this to be extra true. I want to spend time with poems that shock me out of…
Timi Sanni’s poem, like the mother it portrays, does not flinch from darkness, even in its musicality. The “we” who speaks insists the reader follow them into the observation of this unbearable moment and learn something difficult about love and…
What simpler purpose could poetry serve? To reach out, with love, to those we are losing, have lost, will lose? With grace, with love—for us as much as herself, Ajanae Dawkins has written a poem we are all afraid to…
“There’s so much negative space / in this room, Ma,” laments the speaker in Samantha Hsiung’s “Tank Man Before Execution,” then proceeds to deftly complicate the negative space of the poem. In a lyric reimagining both elegiac and defiant, this…
Congratulations to the winners of Frontier Poetry’s 2022 OPEN and an enormous thanks to everyone who submitted. Thank you, also, for your patience while we reviewed all the extraordinary work. A BIG round of applause to Yi Wei, the winner…
This poem by Shannan Mann has grief fifteen times. A ghazal, an epic, a gift, a woman’s own yawp, “In Grief” searches—like a scalpel searches—the space of grief for both joy and terror, rest and violence. In Grief Men of…
“I’m still in half-/sleep,” Dare Williams writes—an invitation, to you, into a shared dream / shared page. Like dreams, Dare’s poem asserts, poetry is a place to rewrite our own history, to tell our own story, our way. In My…
