Jacob Boyd writes a sharp, semi-ekphrastic poem that addresses love alongside mental health struggle, sandwiched between the present and a memory. With the rhythm of song, this poem in couplets turns lyrics and idioms inside out and into surprising glimpses…
This poem flows across even its absences, emphasized in caesura. Sodïq Oyèkànmí writes into transformation with the echoes of the past and the fears of the future joining into a request for togetherness. i am becoming more & more like…
Animated by its speaker’s distinct voice, this poem by Samia Saliba catalogues feelings of alienation that eventually draw us into a moment of ekphrastic revelation. at the lakeshore trader joe’s they were playing the x files theme song & i…
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,…
Please join us in congratulating Kathryn Hargett-Hsu, winner of the 2023 Frontier Breakthrough Chapbook Contest. Hargett-Hsu’s manuscript was selected by Kemi Alabi and will be published in spring 2024. And congratulations to our outstanding finalists and longlisters! We’re confident we’ll…
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…
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…
