We’re all very excited to share with you the winners of the 2019 Frontier Industry Prize, selected by Eve L. Ewing, Kaveh Akbar, and Ocean Vuong. Stay tuned for our second place poem by Alan Semerdjian next Wednesday, and our…
Though the poem would split you into stilts and beads and strangeness, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s “What I Said to God” also brings you back, sinks you back into your body—that which you, so very often, forget you are. Notice the gentleness…
Like most contemporary sonneteers, Anthony Borruso has taken aim at the right margin of his “Another Dusky Sonnet” and the lines bristle with dynamic force and momentum—like bones protruding from the sand. And like the poem’s inspiration, Dali, he builds his…
Chisom Okafor, who we’ve been admiring for a while now, delivers a dark and moving portrait of a specific and not unfamiliar moment: “A shorter Note On My Coming Out.” Chisom speaks with such ease through his untouched dark, his…
“mi sister/mi hermana,” by Heidi Seaborn, is a tender performance of sisterhood, of two women standing in each other’s lives. Butterflies and whipoowills and a blue walled garden—but also choked throats and lions and needles that pierce and pin. …
Is there meaning in nonsense? A symbol hidden in the wound? Ask Ben Zarov—ask his “Wounded Bee” and his silkworm god unspooling the exact measure you need. Whatever nonsense that may be. Wounded Bee The wounded bee dances her coordinates,…
“False Friends,” by Natan Last, moves with intoxicating energy. So much relies on the subtle strength of Natan’s diction, his adventurous associative leaping, and the sly lubricating humor (via Old French from Latin humor: ‘moisture’) from beginning to end. A wonderful…
Emily Lawson cradles tender her subject in “Migration Elegy”—the frail tigerskinned butterflies, their makeshift “flaming cathedral.” Eco-poetry at its most human and delicate: her words become fresh-cut flowers left behind. Migration Elegy ++++Among the fluttering leaves, I see one flare—my…
Sarah Kathryn Moore’s “Volcada” is a cascade of thoughtful and aesthetic diction—a rumbling between the blue of our guts and the sun-drunk mind. Attach yourself to the motion and find yourself leaning, precariously, above Moore’s vast gap of lack. Volcada
Jona Colson’s ethereal “Dream from the Tiger” crawls into your lap—oversized, striped, purring. We adore the echoes of Stevens’ “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”, the ways Colson generates fresh new meaning in the images and language, and wish too to part…
