Poetry: mapmaking by Destiny Hemphill
Every body is a frontier of survival, and Destiny Hemphill’s poem lays the map bare. The speaker builds a life out of memories pinned to her body, to the palm of her hand and to her ribs and to her…
Category: Poetry
Poetry: Severity by Jessica Regione
Do love poems need love? Or just the anxiety of its proximity? Jessica Regione’s “Severity” works so well because that anxiety is delicately laid bare over a wintery afternoon. Modern romance: the unknowable ways we wish to describe the softness…
Poetry: Standing at The Mirror, The Author Writes by Brandon Melendez (with Interview)
This poem, from Brandon Melendez just-released debut from Write Bloody Publishing—Gold that Frames the Mirror—is an affirmation, a confession of acceptance. And while the speaker’s body ripens with a choice: to hate, or to forgive, so much depends on the swing of a…
Poetry: 3 Poems by Carlina Duan
These three poems by Carlina Duan, demanding to be published together, intimately reveal family: “Portrait with Bok Choy in Pan” animates the kitchen, the cook’s tender art; “The Older Sister” aches with sibling affection; while “On Mackinac Island, I Cast…
Poetry: Ezekiel 37 by Sean McQuinney
The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37) projects a mass resurrection of bones and death for the prophet Ezekiel—an incomprehensibly bold prophecy in today’s after-Auschwitz world, and one with which Sean McQuinney wrestles beautifully to find his voice…
Poetry: The Fortune Teller by Jessica Fischoff
Jessica Fischoff’s mythic poem leans into divinated romance, star-spoken inevitability. “The Fortune Teller” speaks with few lines, but pulls the wide galactic into the palm, the body. We want the fortune to be real. The Fortune Teller Give me…
2018 Frontier OPEN Winner: Migrations by Mark Wagenaar
Mark Wagenaar’s “Migrations”—a thundering, contemplative silence after the final period. Wagenaar has masterfully crafted a vital epic for our times, and the $5000 prize for 1st Place in our 2018 OPEN is well-earned. Migrations Sparrow, I answer, when our…
2018 Frontier OPEN Runner-Ups: Elizabeth Oxley & Sam Zafris
Honored to share the two runner-ups to the 2018 Frontier OPEN: Elizabeth Oxley has won 2nd place and Sam Zafris 3rd! Expelling Venus by Elizabeth Oxley When the doctor says he’ll need to remove my ovaries, I consider performing a…
2018 Frontier OPEN Finalists
First, a sincere thank you to all the finalists for partnering with us. All of these poems deserve high praise, featuring work by Jocelyn Williams, Korey Williams, Hillary Martin, K.A. Jagai, and Oriana Ivy. E.D. Watson is also a finalist,…
Poetry: preparing an elegy by Jenny Shen
Jenny Shen’s power in “preparing an elegy” rises as invitation to familial intimacy—the poem rolls forward like a stream of consciousness and captures a mother and her daughter in a fragile moment, in the kitchen, in a conversation with so…
