In Su Cho’s moving debut, The Symmetry of Fish, language, culture, and family form a potent core for a speaker navigating the Korean-American experience. It dissects the world and the self’s unnamable parts, and reshapes them into tangible pieces the speaker gently offers to the reader. Memory and the tricks time plays on it are […]
“I saw you shadow of / a shadow / maybe I thought / I made you / up.” In this unknowing place begins Leila Chatti’s heartbreaking and breathtaking chapbook, Figment, which explores Chatti’s personal experience with pregnancy loss. Chatti is not new to writing about the body. Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her full-length, debut […]
The Red Flower For Viviano Pérez Pérez Photo by Giulia May The smallest hummingbird will only survive on another island. Two wings of the same bird. I once found my most coveted bed on a rooftop that overlooked a guava tree in the barrio of music. My father’s first word was Spanish when my grandmother […]
The Crows Photo by David Trinks I left out a bowl of rice dressed in violets and honey, unsure if it was offering or temptation. A crow appeared on my kitchen counter and ate it all. The next morning the crow returned with its flock, shades draping the shagbark, all of them chanting their own […]
Sweet Field Anemoia Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary ……………….anemoia (n.) — nostalgia for a time you’ve never known ……….coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows There was, at one time, an empty field. I’m sure of it. Or, was it a forest so jaded that a vine snake’s darting left only a […]
Given the social unrest that has occurred over the past few years, it seems, at least from a Western perspective, that the direction society is headed will eventually lead us to a place that we no longer recognize. Cultural, economic, environmental, and political changes no doubt influence our day-to-day conversations and sentiments, and they quickly […]
How does a poet write down their journey of personal maturity in rendered honesty? That’s just one of the many questions that Jessica Hincapie’s debut poetry collection, Bloomer, seeks to answer. It is a book where the speaker shares a constellation of coming-of-age experiences that mirror the twists and turns of any life spent learning […]
Though I don’t follow sports in general, I never miss the Olympics. Each Olympic sport has its own highly detailed set of rules—boundaries that athletes push up against to showcase the absolute potential of the sport. Swimmers shave hundredths of seconds off of world records, skateboarders land complicated tricks that will later be named for […]
Rage Hezekiah’s latest collection, Yearn—a winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest—is so sensuous in its wanting, so powerful in the lyricism of its sexual and personal agency, so lush in its ecology, that it makes one wonder if another word for yearn might not be poem. To poem, as in to reach across […]
Dogged, by Stacy Gnall, is a collection of poems that explores the relationship between the human and the animal, the human and the monstrous, and all the points of connection in these thematic arenas. As suggested by the title, there is a recurring focus on dogs—including a distinct historical perspective that encompasses the history (or […]