Featured Poetry

Poetry: What Rituals Did You Perform? by Kathryn Hunt

By Kathryn Hunt | April 24, 2020

Kathryn Hunt’s elegy pursues the ultimately elusive goal: meaning and sense before the lip of the grave. Somehow, “What Rituals Did You Perform?” answers itself, as only poetry does, in the asking.   What Rituals Did You Perform? When you…

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Poetry: Foundling by Anna Seidel

By Anna Seidel | April 17, 2020

“Foundling” by Anna Seidel: a poem that leaves room in the mouth for tonguing the edge of each sweet word. Foundling In the evening, a scorpion in bed. A cheerful and a sad wind blowing across the room. You kiss…

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Poetry: Leaving by Anna Tomlinson

By Anna Tomlinson | April 10, 2020

“Leaving” performs with delicate movements and lures the reader as a burglar from room to room, pockets filling with jewels. Anna Tomlinson’s work asks us how much of our want is our own, and how much of it we dare…

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Poetry: Village of Knives by Helli Fang

By Helli Fang | April 3, 2020

The speaker of “Village of Knives” is an Atlas of her own life—menace and threat and the persistence of being a woman who survives. Helli Fang’s work leaves the reader in a different posture, a leaning, a dark looking over…

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Poetry: Retrato in Names by féi hernandez

By féi hernandez | March 27, 2020

“Retrato in Names” is prose with energy and music and eager rush. Through the intimacy of nicknames, féi hernandez investigates the trajectory of a family wrestling with its own definition and meaning, of a daughter and a sister and a…

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2019 Frontier OPEN Finalists

By Frontier Poetry | March 25, 2020

First, a sincere thank you to all the finalists of the 2019 Frontier OPEN for partnering with us. All of these poems deserve high praise, featuring work by Jasmine Elizabeth Smith, Xiao Yumi, Leyla Colpan, Jennifer Garfield, Jed Myers, David…

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Poetry: SKIN OFF MY BACK by Bayley Sprowl

By Bayley Sprowl | March 20, 2020

Bayley Sprowl’s visceral “SKIN OFF MY BACK” sings the song of the body—its dirge, its elastic melancholy and trembling want of other. The poem seeks to understand: such want in the end, and in the beginning, may only ever be…

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Poetry: Purple by Laura Argiri

By Laura Argiri | March 13, 2020

We were so excited to see this strong narrative poem in the slush—a story of a young girl with a rock in her hand and purple in her blood. Laura Argiri pulls out character and action and scene from poetic…

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Poetry: Decade & Not a Wall by Jose Hernandez Diaz

By Jose Hernandez Diaz | March 6, 2020

There is something wonderful about the prose poem, the way it elongates our necessity of closure, and the way, too, we are swept up into the rhythm of the sentence; the prose poem illustrates a world we both know and…

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Poetry: Sprawling, the garden is, and fruitful by Justin Danzy

By Justin Danzy | February 28, 2020

Beauty, life, growth, abundance—these are a few things a garden can represent, and of these few things comes family, the sacredness of one’s family, the ways in which love is the vehicle. In Justin Danzy’s, Sprawling, the garden is, and…

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