Hello, everyone! Cavar here, to bring you my second entry into the Exceptional Poetry archives (find the first one here, in case you missed it) I’m here to bring you four more poems (well…in this case, more than four; you’ll…
Alight with a sense of intergenerational connection, Arah Ko’s “Catching” enters its speaker’s childhood and expands into a pursuit of a family history—“a long line of flame-mongers”—and resistances. Moving the reader through sharply woven couplets that blend past and present,…
Timelessly elegiac, “Gabriel” threads the speaker’s current moment of mourning and reflection alongside a direct address to the poem’s namesake, generating a wrenching and veiled portrait of both the dead and the bereaved’s unresolvable struggle with suffering. Gabriel It will…
Gaia Rajan’s “Essay on Class” reveals its speaker’s personal exploration of the relationship between wealth and the accessibility of beautiful things. We love this poem in part for its tone, which is quietly measured, and the contrast this has with…
Hello, everyone! I’m Cavar, Frontier’s new associate editor. I’m excited to be taking over Frontier’s Exceptional Poetry column, and can’t wait to share some of my favorite poem-finds with you. For the last few years, I’ve published a Substack with…
Through the surprising yet poignant frame of learning “which language hope is most fluent in,” Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s poem brings the reader into the speaker’s fear in the midst of health crisis. This poem works its magic in part by juxtaposing…
Constantly turning, this brief poem celebrates the fullness of desire between partners who are together in their disparate roles. “Nongestational” is a lesson in the power of each individual word to shape a poem, from the title to the final,…
A poem foregrounding the distance between our ability to describe and a thing in itself, Cindy King’s “Noumenon” is a whirling syntactical search. Absence, which emerges in the final lines, becomes the catalyst for the question of what was it…
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…
We often wonder, what are fresh and engaging ways to approach the lush tradition of love poetry? Xueyi Zhou’s poem is a gorgeous example of this—unexpected, driven by a compelling voice and constant, charged turns. Love Poem by a Cynic…
