LaGrone’s “Arko” elapses within a single sentence, tucking moons and bones and love into its nine couplets. The poem gathers its imagery on the backs of short, delicate three and four syllable lines—a fragility that LaGrone bears with envious ease.…
Taiye lands this poem in the delicate spot between bodies and dreams—a primal response can’t be helped against the throaty “leaves”, the “claws” of death and drowning. The reader wakes from Taiye’s “Dream” with their whole day changed. I…
Bales packages her frank questioning here with untamed energy and honesty. “Questions” crafts a strange comfort in the face of death—precisely—as its title suggests—because the poem does not gesture at hollow answers, but wrestles with humor and charm the incredible…
For “Close,” Wesner generates—with the smallest lines she could—the broad ambiguity we have toward our bodies, our parents, our thinking. So many powerful punches land between these two-three word lines; these sentence long stanzas fight above their weight. Close…
“Aubade with La Bestia” beautifully parses the potential of a love poem through eyes contemporary and rarely seen. As all good love poems, Aguilar’s aubade sings of power, and generosity, and longing, and violence—the dark immutable violence always hugging the…
Some poems step out from conventional wisdom of lines and stanzas bashful and hesitant—”Game Theory” by Z.K. Hitzig is not bashful or hesitant. The atypical shape is a joy for the reader’s eye, a puzzle to put together that once…
Michael Pagan’s beautiful ekphrasis reminds us what is so compelling about the film—the tender exploration of love and self, the bodies holding bodies, the water. Are you water enough? The night I watched Moonlight for the first time, I thought…
These two poems by Meg Eden offer clear vision of so many homes: the losses that age inevitably brings, the memories that lift and twist with time, the search for a daughter’s place and difference before her mother. It’s all…
Alan Chazaro’s poem gets in your body and roots around—asks you to hold uncomfortably warm objects in your hand, cracks open your reluctant jaw, unknots your tender limbs. One of those pieces: you walk in a stranger, leave a lover.…
Our last finalists are three amazing poets: Ebony E. Chinn, Regina Marie, and Amanda Hawkins. So many stunners included here: the moonlight tied down, the withered claw, the stones we hold in our chests. Enjoy, share, lift up these talented…
