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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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…

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

What’s beyond the two lights at the edge / of the bay bridge tunnel blinking / out of turn, one a bit more butch / than the other

With their hands clasped and knuckles squeezed white, the newlyweds descended the church steps. Flashing cameras froze the tossed rice in midair. Later that day at the crime scene, when the detective was handed the photos he could hear the grains clatter to the pavement.

You once said to me—as a joke, I suppose—that all your books are “brief, collaborative, and plagiarized,” but really what is the secret to your somewhat monomaniacal rate of production, especially the last decade?

When she got a paper cut, that speck seemed newly foreboding—she’d lick it off, heart accelerating, as if to let it pool for even a moment would invite some deviously patient menace.