“The Domino Effect” is one of those poems that travels. Jeff Whitney uses these couplets to assemble vastness, one aphorism at a time, one startling image leaning into the next. What’s left, the poem ultimately asks, when it all falls down?…
A strange connection exists between poetry and teaching, and Afua Ansong explores it beautifully with subtle couplets and understated scene work. Notice how her students come alive in the focus of her language, how the poem respects Joseph and Erika…
Poetry and tragedy cannot be divorced. With “For Ayotzinapa,” this is abundantly clear. Matty Layne Glasgow writes a commanding tribute to the students who lost their lives a handful of years ago—commanding our attention with dryly cut images and visual…
These five beautiful little poems by Jos Charles prove the power of brevity. The succinct linework introduces delicate imagery with a voice that is distant, yet intimate, bare, yet bursting with bodies. Charles knows how to leverage space and silence…
Noor Hindi reminds us of some of the best things of today’s poetry: deep, contemporary faith insights wrapped in the heat of luminous body, with all its parts magnified and hyperbolic. Notice how the subtle rhythms and meter set by…
We love the mouthfeel of Daniel Lassell’s “How to Take Time,” the patience for the right word in its right place—and the courage it performs in reaching for deep wisdom off the back of a red headed woodpecker. Lassell is…
We love the pace that Patricia Miranda builds in “A Sunday Afternoon”—she packs the single stanza with delicate humor and a theatrical rush. Too easily we see the speaker as ourselves, clumsily reversing through a day of mishandled opportunity and…
With subtle luxury of sound, Emily Strauss writes of the desert, the West. Couplets hide the harmony crafted line by line until that final hard rhyme, shining like a jewel. Strauss understates her language as “dry and austere,” “barren”—but the…
Moira J. has written a visceral love poem with “THESE ARE THE WITNESS MARKS”—full of bodytalk and imagery that burrows under your skin, makes your back itch. Notice the goosebumps, the old salt, the zodiac mouth, but also the lover…
This long poem, by P.J. Williams, drives. A beautifully paced meditation on place and family and memory, filled with blues and grays and burnished dawns—”the road to old fort” invites the reader in on a trip enjoyably unexpected. With Williams’s permission,…
