These two poems make secrets feel familiar. Stacy Boe Miller archives moments here, in “Hollow” and “Boil Down”—small, intimate moments of childhood, of death and love and the body, knocking together like pearls on a string you’d wear to a…
Selected by Tyehimba Jess as the second runner up for the Award for New Poets, Matty Layne Glasgow’s poem playfully bristles between fragility and loving violence. Simple in conceit, complex in execution, “deciduous qween, IV” is a treat for lovers,…
We are so pleased to share with you the winning poem of the 2017 Award for New Poets—”Souvenir,” selected by guest judge Tyehimba Jess, explores with trembling sincerity the fragility of family, and love, and self. Todd Smith has won…
When poems carry as much raw energy as these two by Momtaza Mehri, we feel the joy of riding language like a wild horse—all instinct and reaction and emotion on the edge, one joy to the next, with hardly a…
Here, Jennifer Givhan lays bare a particular American anxiety, in all it’s ambiguity, in all its banal suburbanness. “The Monsters Are Due” is about motherhood and childhood and Americanhood—a reminder that once eyes are open, we have to fight to…
Cassandra Farrin’s poem rustles with the sound of waves and devils. “The Whale” is exactly how you make surprising a literary figure so well known as to be automatically cliche in lesser hands. Let the lines fill your mouth with…
Katie Bickham’s “Hiroshima, Japan, 1945” is a masterclass in characterization within a poem. Yoshiko lives and breathes with real, genuine depth across the 36 lines—and when a poem works this hard to give us a character so delightful, wisdom is…
Rosebud Ben-Oni’s love poem curls into itself, thematically and visually—put the anaphoric “to” on your tongue and let her generosity of language and image carry you into equine affection. There’s so much given here, and where a lesser poem would…
Some poems evoke an old voice inside—maybe manufactured by school, by history, by Dickinson—that leaps from word to word with unexpected vitality and novelty. Carolyn Oliver’s “Prayer”—a Golden Shovel, the form invented by Terrance Hayes—presses “the long lush dark” into…
Call these three poems by Kristin Chang brutal. Call them violent, haunting, body-strewn and murderous. But do not deny their anchored beauty and exquisite craft—the heart and family and city laid bare, the poetry besieged by the tragedy of bodies.…
