Tag: featured

Poetry: Hiroshima, Japan, 1945 by Katie Bickham

Katie Bickham’s “Hiroshima, Japan, 1945” is a masterclass in characterization within a poem. Yoshiko lives and breathes with real, genuine depth across the 36 lines—and when a poem works this hard to give us a character so delightful, wisdom is…

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Poetry: Prayer by Carolyn Oliver

Some poems evoke an old voice inside—maybe manufactured by school, by history, by Dickinson—that leaps from word to word with unexpected vitality and novelty. Carolyn Oliver’s “Prayer”—a Golden Shovel, the form invented by Terrance Hayes—presses “the long lush dark” into…

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Poetry: 3 Poems by Kristin Chang

Call these three poems by Kristin Chang brutal. Call them violent, haunting, body-strewn and murderous. But do not deny their anchored beauty and exquisite craft—the heart and family and city laid bare, the poetry besieged by the tragedy of bodies.…

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Poetry: The Domino Effect by Jeff Whitney

“The Domino Effect” is one of those poems that travels. Jeff Whitney uses these couplets to assemble vastness, one aphorism at a time, one startling image leaning into the next. What’s left, the poem ultimately asks, when it all falls down?…

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Poetry: Essay Retreat by Afua Ansong

A strange connection exists between poetry and teaching, and Afua Ansong explores it beautifully with subtle couplets and understated scene work. Notice how her students come alive in the focus of her language, how the poem respects Joseph and Erika…

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Poetry: i, ii, iii, iv, v by Jos Charles

These five beautiful little poems by Jos Charles prove the power of brevity. The succinct linework introduces delicate imagery with a voice that is distant, yet intimate, bare, yet bursting with bodies. Charles knows how to leverage space and silence…

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