Breathless and rolling, “Although You Felt So Close, (Within Splashes)” presses with momentum at every line. The poem lands at a breakneck intimacy that’s surprising and comfortable, and Adrian Cepeda carries his reader with fluid motion, puts their feet on…
The poetic gestures of “Burning Haibun” are simple, genuine, and surprising. As soon as we read the prose-poem section, we knew this was going to be accepted—but then, as we read the erasure, we got so excited to share it that…
Mai Der Vang stands out as a poet of stunning & lurid language. These two new poems exemplify the work displayed in her debut collection, Afterland (Graywolf Press 2017)—the geographies of grief & the bare evidence of spiritual truth. Vang, with linguistic dexterity,…
Lance Larsen’s Sad Jar of Atoms rolls in the ear like the voice of a friend. The lines pile and caress each other, holding onto intimacy even as we’re stretched from domestic quibbles to ancient history. Exploring the overlapping associations…
Safia Elhillo’s The January Children has been on of the most exciting collections of 2017. These two new poems show why. Here, Elhillo comfortably explores established and invented forms with her beautiful, consistent focus on language, and bodies, and the hot spot where two cultures collide. There…
If you haven’t yet read a poem by the rising poet Kaveh Akbar, “Tassiopeia” is a great place to start: beautiful language dances between fresh images of the body and confessions of faith. Kaveh writes gracefully, without awkwardness or hesitation, and this poem…
Jim Daniels has produced poetry about work with singular focus for the entirety of his distinguished career. At Frontier, we also believe that work is an ever more apt poetic subject—precisely because it affects all the other subjects in a…
We are so excited to get the chance to publish some of Hanif’s latest work. You can see some of his usual strokes here: the play with breath & pause, the mischievous titles, the exploration of race & truth &…
The press of associative leaps, dream like & urbane simultaneously, carries this poem. So much contained between the blue skull and the teeth-pennies—Cynthia does excellent work here to place side-by-side the reader’s relatable experience with the (dangerous) strangeness of exile…
Vandana does something special here. Amidst the language of nature—the lush green forests, the stars, the twigs—this poem grips our bodies firm. Vandana finds space to bring in bones & tongues & the pulse of blood, & especially those hands.…
