A selection of recent special features, essays, interviews and reviews
“They’re talking about real stuff, and sometimes it’s funny and sometimes you’re not sure you should be laughing, and poetry also so often lives in that same kind of in-between, uncomfortable space.”
“Sharif excavates orientations of space and time, revealing a tense lucidity.”
“At the center of Klink’s lyric resides the tension between profound emotional intensity and profound emotional delicacy.”
“Don Mee Choi’s words point us toward a world beyond the American imagination.” —Woogee Bae
The Elasticity of the Sonnet in Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets
“The dark, for me, is always a place of brimming; even when it is anguishing and unbearable. . .”
A series of poems by BIPOC poets that engage with birds, curated by Sean Hill.
“In English, speakers are actors and objects are acted upon. A persimmon is there to be eaten. For Powhatan speakers, it just as likely might not be there since the persimmon, like other objects of the natural world, has an agency and animacy of its own.”—an essay by Emily Parzybok
“I wanted people to fall in love with nature through words and want to protect it, the way I had as a child, writing on a concrete stoop in a subdivision. In a way, words were my quarry. I mined their layers for meaning, and when I made something beautiful and useful from them, I felt lighter somehow, as if the overburden of living—the debris of its many griefs—had been lifted.”—an essay by Melissa Reeser Poulin
“Hong’s essays and poems ask how to write about a country’s murderous onset, when the bloody order continues?”—Paul Hlava Ceballos
