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…
At Frontier, we’ve been compelled by the relationship of poetry and the sensation of roots—how do experiences that connect us to the deep past make us whole as humans? Zoe Kimone’s “My Garden” is a brief and beautiful exploration of that…
Mayowa Oyewale seeks out the roots, through language, of connection and disconnection. “Fine forgetfulness,” the poem calls it, the state of a tongue transformed, making room for new words to share its mouth. Why Do You Answer in Yoruba III…
Some poems wade in with the tide, some pour down your scalp like oil—”Sundays” throws fistfuls of paint, covers you in heated stones. Megan Nichols has made every square inch of language a lever and a weight, a clockwork machine…
Jae Nichelle has made a poem that does what a poem ought to do: stuff the barrel, place a stack of words and truth between the bullet and its target. Terrance Hayes describes the rules behind the Golden Shovel’s structure…
Some poems land with a whimper, some with a wrenching—”Combinatorics, 2″, by Raphael Luis J. Salise, lands with a blade gripped between its teeth. Combinatorics, 2
Exuberant in its decay, crushing delicacy, hopping over spilt blood and the ruins of bodies and cities and pointing a gun directly at you, the reader, face lit by a screen of metal and glass: Michael Imossan’s “This city was…
“If it doesn’t smell like bleach,” the speaker asks, “how do you know it’s clean?” Keri Withington’s “Southern Summer #1” is a poem that defines its own clean smell: of green things and wet things and the way young bodies…
Sometimes, you’ve got to make way for the joy, the sweep of it across your sense of sweat and time. Thank you, Mayank, for giving our team that, and for giving us your poem to share. When we were…
