Kathryn Hunt’s elegy pursues the ultimately elusive goal: meaning and sense before the lip of the grave. Somehow, “What Rituals Did You Perform?” answers itself, as only poetry does, in the asking. What Rituals Did You Perform? When you…
“Foundling” by Anna Seidel: a poem that leaves room in the mouth for tonguing the edge of each sweet word. Foundling In the evening, a scorpion in bed. A cheerful and a sad wind blowing across the room. You kiss…
“Leaving” performs with delicate movements and lures the reader as a burglar from room to room, pockets filling with jewels. Anna Tomlinson’s work asks us how much of our want is our own, and how much of it we dare…
The speaker of “Village of Knives” is an Atlas of her own life—menace and threat and the persistence of being a woman who survives. Helli Fang’s work leaves the reader in a different posture, a leaning, a dark looking over…
“Retrato in Names” is prose with energy and music and eager rush. Through the intimacy of nicknames, féi hernandez investigates the trajectory of a family wrestling with its own definition and meaning, of a daughter and a sister and a…
First, a sincere thank you to all the finalists of the 2019 Frontier OPEN for partnering with us. All of these poems deserve high praise, featuring work by Jasmine Elizabeth Smith, Xiao Yumi, Leyla Colpan, Jennifer Garfield, Jed Myers, David…
Bayley Sprowl’s visceral “SKIN OFF MY BACK” sings the song of the body—its dirge, its elastic melancholy and trembling want of other. The poem seeks to understand: such want in the end, and in the beginning, may only ever be…
We were so excited to see this strong narrative poem in the slush—a story of a young girl with a rock in her hand and purple in her blood. Laura Argiri pulls out character and action and scene from poetic…
There is something wonderful about the prose poem, the way it elongates our necessity of closure, and the way, too, we are swept up into the rhythm of the sentence; the prose poem illustrates a world we both know and…
Beauty, life, growth, abundance—these are a few things a garden can represent, and of these few things comes family, the sacredness of one’s family, the ways in which love is the vehicle. In Justin Danzy’s, Sprawling, the garden is, and…
