Grace Lau’s “Yuhua Hamasaki” arrives at just the right moment—with power, with vitality, with dragulous charm. The poem crunches your expectations of womanhood, of Chinese womanhood, and invites you to a feast of new realities. WHEN YUHUA HAMASAKI WENT…
We love how José del Valle’s “The Opposite of a Great Truth Is Also True” compresses some of the biggest beliefs of the day into small marbles of imagery, rolled out across the lines. Time is squeezed, the past is…
Aurora Masum-Javed’s “singularity” has been selected as third place in the Summer Poetry Award because the work meditates profoundly on the vulnerability of being a daughter, of being someone else’s dream, of being a body, frail and falling through time.…
Leila Chatti’s poem on the perennial politics of sex and power has won 2nd place in the Summer Poetry Award. “After Reading…” exemplifies some of the best poetic-moves that today’s poets enjoy making: the collision of pop culture inanity with…
“Louisiana Requiem” hangs itself on your heart like Spanish moss. The poem expands with grace, like a full womb, from the first line to the last. Heather Treseler has earned the $2000 prize and Summer Poetry Award, because this poem,…
Gabriel Seals writes delicately of family, of houses and siblings and parents. “The last, the only” layers gentle loneliness on the soft threads of relationships, on the “naked masses” of our familial hopes and losses—asking, where is home? the last,…
Alyssa Quinn’s poem kaleidoscopes from a birds-eye view the earth, the cracking white earth of the salt flats. With fluid grace, the poem moves from the grass and ground to geometric ideals, so that the reader holds both in their…
Sonnets are the perennial form because within the fourteen lines is a universe of choices. Sam Pittman’s new poem makes these choices with grace, guiding the reader’s breath with such maturity that the final couplet easily takes it away. …
“Glitter Ode” struts through a exuberant associative landscape, with glitter—marvelously annoying and excessive—as anchor, as compass. Hemmert’s poem has got us on our feet, wiggling, turning our hips and shoulders and feet, looking for the shine. Glitter Ode …
Our editors love the way Shane Chergosky’s poem generates an authentic and gothic setting out of the skate park—the empty cans, the suggestion of infinity, and that sick, bleeding sky. “Corporal” exceeds itself and its deliberately banal details wonderfully at…
