Soft Apocalypse

Leah Nieboer’s stunning debut collection of poems, Soft Apocalypse, captures the visceral experience of a body—cosmically alone, contending with illness, often on the move—as her dislocated speaker passes through a series of fractured sites and shadowed scenes. Spare, crystalline lyrics with minimal capitalization and punctuation are scaffolded by prose poems at irregular intervals, each one […]

A Face Out of Clay

*** FORTHCOMING JUNE 2024 / THE MOUNTAIN/WEST POETRY SERIES *** A Face Out of Clay delves deep into a kaleidoscope of childhood experiences, cultural identity, and the convergence of imagination and memory. Through eloquent verses and poignant imagery, alternating between narrative and lyric poems, the book paints a complicated portrait of a bi-national speaker. The […]

Before the Confession

Photo by Jon Sailer on Unsplash   Something there, smaller and meaner than before— where the palm of the hand rests on the collarbone— ails me. I’m sure that’s where the shame is. How it shrank like an old walnut, what was once the locust-heart of summer. The meadowlark’s V for victory over the yellow […]

Sestina Obbligato

Photo by Umanoide on Unsplash   The orchestra ambushes me with Mahler’s Fifth. I never played; I have no innate sense of music, so it’s a shock to feel the brass ransack my body. Stop I rasp when the trumpets make my edges blur and a solo horn tugs my soul through my throat. Stop. […]

The Cabinet

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash   I must remember to open the cabinet of forgotten things. That’s where the bottles are. Bottles of solutions that enhance memory. Or do they stoke the imagination? I think I recall the lock’s combination. Isn’t it the date of a French king’s death? Or the net worth of […]

I Think I Am That Poem

Photo by Andrew Eihausen on Unsplash   After Edgar Kunz’s “Piano”¹   My father is the kind of dying that acts as reminder. When I call I can hear, through clearness, breath. All the signs of the living he does are dying signs. He is a messenger. I wish I could drag his body sled-bound, […]

Āina Hānau / Birth Land

In the title poem of Āina Hānau / Birth Land, Brandy Nālani McDougall asks, “na wai kēia mo‘olelo hānau?”—“Whose birth story is this?” The book answers: these poems are the story of all of Hawai‘i: land, plants, animals, every ancestor, every child. This expansive collection stretches across Hawai‘i’s history while McDougall, the Hawai‘i Poet Laureate […]

Living Room

The 1977 educational film Powers of Ten begins with an aerial view of a couple picnicking in the park—a strange perspective, as if we were giants. Over the next five minutes, the video zooms out at the rate of one power of ten every ten seconds. We see the park framing the picnic blanket, the […]

Brother Poem

In Will Harris’s Brother Poem, the lines between reality and dreamscapes blur, and readers dwell in the visages and myths an individual creates about oneself. Each poem hangs like its own word cloud in a vast, verse-filled sky. Deeply sensitive and acutely self-aware, Brother Poem carefully dissects familial complexities, difficult relationships, and love and living’s […]