Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal.

The Devil knew exactly where to go. There were plenty of places in the world where the sun slanted long across plaza stones and shone like diamonds in the spray of fountains.

I met Christine during a balmy summer at the Winter Tangerine workshops in New York.

As a Californian, Daniel Gumbiner has thought a lot about the aftermath of disaster. What happens long after the emergency workers and news cameras have gone home?

I grow daffodils now, try to reimagine / night and pretend that doors are / simple.

We were on the roof of Nikita’s house, drinking beers. This is in the Central Valley. The roof was black and, so, hot. It wasn’t summer yet, but almost.

I’m writing a book about fires. Metaphorical and literal. About the way human relationships spontaneously combust. How a self crashes and burns.

Through the logic and lens of horror films, Reed examines the market demands of poetry (yes, these do exist), academic life, and the anxieties produced by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising fascism.

When my mother left for the man with a cruel son, I kept / my nails sharp for when he would draw back, swing. I left

Lobsang kept saying that crossing fates with me would get him killed. When we first got on the road, an old woman at the foot of the mountain had been…

Lisa Teasley’s first three books, Glow in the Dark, Dive, and Heat Signature came out in 2002, 2004, and 2006 respectively.

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, and Bat City Review, but you might know…

I have known Joshua Burton since 2014 when we attended the Boldface Workshop at the University of Houston.

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

A drowning person will not splash and wave, will not shout or call out for help. Contrary to the ways in which it is dramatically performed on television and in film, drowning is nearly always physically unexpressed, measurably silent.

I can still feel / my father’s hands / pulling my hair / into a rough ponytail

I was twenty-seven when I saw him again, at a birthday party for my sister that uncomfortably straddled the line between our broke college years and some recently adopted bourgeois values.

i know you’re thinking of me: it’s just about to rain.

Farah Ali’s novel, The River, The Town (Dzanc Books, 2023), set in an unnamed municipality in the south of Pakistan, reads like an eerie fictional mirror to an Amnesty International report released the same year.

We leave our offerings. We prepare the meat the way / we were taught, snap the wing, relish the song of crack

Monica Youn is one of the most brilliant people you will ever meet. This seems to be a shared consensus among the people I know who have also met her.

My father said there were no other / words like the compound words / in the Armenian language.

before their war, the Aqlla served / overflowing quinoa milk / to unworthy undeserving grins

I grew up immune to the ordinary, surrounded by a past / I was expected to sit on and memorize

Site is a four-part series of visual poems/essays/works. Each work reproduces the Trinity Test site in New Mexico—the location of the first atomic blast the world has known—at specific moments in time after the detonation.

And yet: my work is labor the way love is labor, is liability, is constant risk assessment.

an exercise in mining the worst possibilities from the ridges / of the brain absent of stalagmitic reach

Beauty also is unaccounted for. / The mist is merely what it is: water

Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to / know madness as a way of searching.

Fady Joudah’s newest poetry collection […] (Milkweed Editions, March 2024), written during the bombardment of Gaza from October to December 2023, marks the loss of language during an ongoing genocide.

When I get to heaven I will be bruised / and I will not answer any of God’s questions.

The yellow powder blankets my car as thick as the snow that never falls here. For the first time in thirty years, I am allergic. Everyone smokes for comfort and so grows the communal cough.

Late one night in April 2006, I heard an unexpected knock on my bedroom door. I lived at the time with a loose coalition of punks, anarchists, hippies, and nondenominational nonconformists in a squatted block of flats, across from rumbling tracks, in a working class suburb of Barcelona, Spain.

If I show you an image of a bird flying, you might think freedom, or graceful, or wings. You might remember your mother pointing to the sky, naming the bird starling, heron, crow. But all of that is yours.

Jai Chakrabarti’s fiction has a striking orality to it, a tone that emanates from his characters’ psyche and subtly permeates an entire story. On a 2022…