We’re all very excited to share with you the winners of the 2018 Award for New Poets, selected by Victoria Chang. Today, we have “Self-Portrait No. 5” by Cynthia Manick—a lovely poem of birds and bellies and the inevitable struggle…
The past can be a plague, an ever-present intrusion of darkness—Shapiro walks us into the shadow sweetly here, carefully with image and enjambment and long, rolling sentences. A family wakes together on a weekday: the father, the mother and daughters,…
Aline Dolinh’s writing physically invigorates—all that imagery of teeth and blood and mouths over-full. It’s a powerful invitation: to lean your reader body through the mirror of the poem and into its luminous space, dark and bloody as it is.…
It’s no secret that the literary world has baked-in institutional obstacles and biases, and our fellowships, like all we do, are intended as an effort to break those barriers. We are honored to share with you all two poems by our…
Katherine Indermaurs series of triplets flex a considered and deliberate rhythm—let the syntax carry your reading into your body, the pauses and the rushing forward, the flooding of your sense of balance. Her poem meditates on grief and loss, the…
With”at the request of angels,” Kesi Kmt folds language and dialect and dream into a song on growing up and the fire that comes. Every choice serves her speaker—the apocolyptic imagery and the strong, familial dialect—revealed powerfully, surprisingly in the…
Elisávet Makridis delivers a technical scorcher, a palindrome that shifts and moves with precision. The mirrored stanzas deliver surprise, though you’ve already read them, fresh emotion, though you already know the story. “Propulsion” is a compact mirror to the face…
Kendra Allen’s new poem crackles with the energy of language on edge, language in transformation. Without irony or posturing, “Your Name Was Supposed to Be Africa” explores the complicated layering of identity across names and bodies and continents. YOUR…
“The Wound in Drag” is a manifesto of youth—troubled, hopeful, full of phones and wounds and love. Tallon Kennedy cascades their self—wounded, aching—across the four parts, landing finally, perhaps precariously, on the dance floor. The Wound in Drag I.…
Jesse DeLong writes of a time seemingly eras ago—when black children saw one of their own in the Oval Office, when pigments and not political terrorism were the musings of philosophy professors. The vulnerability of “The Exit Ramps” returns us…
