Strung through with the tension invoked by its title, Karan Kapoor’s poem invites us into the complexities of a relationship ridden with bitterness and the wear and tear of years. Through a form which winds unpunctuated like a long road,…
As a platform for emerging poets, our mission is to provide practical help for serious writers. The community lifts itself up together or not at all. In that light, we’ve been asking some great editors from around the literary community…
Alyson Kissner’s “Night Psalms” speaks with piercing, prophetic brevity. “Ask me,” the speaker begs, and invites us into a question that the poem allows to expand like darkness within its numbered framework. Night Psalms 1 Let there be light, He…
We love the daring of a condensed poem, and Meghan Kemp-Gee’s “A Bird in Blue” is condensed yet complex. Its sharp turns convey transformation, opening a world inside its ten lines. A Bird in Blue On the wire, one says,…
Inviting us into an anthem toward abundance, Aida Bardissi writes with unmatched lushness. “revolutionary recipe” is a slow feast, asking us to consider love and all the defiant ways it might nourish and sustain us, with “one fist in air,…
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…
