Jeremy Karn’s work in “first winter in iowa city,” initially feels tentative, as this speaker navigates the boundaries of this new relationship and the boundaries of intimacy and culture that seem to fluctuate between speaker and subject, but by the…
In Sharon Zhang’s “Last Date,” her speaker encounters love from all angles, in a sly merging of pregaming and praxis. The writing is quick and energetic, but Zhang’s fresh voice isn’t flip or glib; rather this speaker is quite rigorous…
“The moon has no need for your poetry,” Ben Cooper says, and he’s right. Sometimes we have to hear difficult truths, difficult versions of the truth. But in his poem, “What Words Do I Not Yet Have,” Cooper doesn’t look…
Mark Hernberg knows how to tug on the heartstrings. Literally. In his poem, “I Was Reading a Scientific Article,” he moves from the metaphor into the metaphysical in just a few lines, his speaker deftly illustrating to the reader the…
Michelle Moroses makes a powerful statement in her poem, “jeopardy people,” when she writes, “the ugliness will not stay inside of you forever. eventually it is going to let itself out…” This kind of statement likely resonates with many people,…
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts:…
Natalie Gates does what we all wish we could—she talks to herself, but herself actually talks back. In this tongue-in-cheek coming of age narrative, “intervention with an imagined older me,” a present-day Gates interrogates a later version of herself, hoping…
Jill Mceldowney’s “Are You Calling To Me, White Deer With No Horns?” brings threads of violence together, a kind of everyday violence that comes from the repeated way that we can all sacrifice our own needs for acceptance, or because…
The first lines of Youssef Mohamed’s poem published here represent a kind of challenge, or perhaps a threat. For those of us participating in the Sealey Challenge, reading a book of poems each day during this August, we can certainly…
“…Kate Winslet is a masterpiece all on her own / but in 2015 she disassembled both ventricles, they / no longer pump my heart,” writes Liz Sutherland. Their poem is eerie and ominous in the way it evokes blood and…
