I first had the pleasure of experiencing Adam Vines’ luminous work when our Associate Editor, Okla Elliott, urged me to read a few of his most recent ekphrastic poems. In the weeks that followed, Okla passed away unexpected at the age of only forty, and at the outset of […]
Several years ago, New American Press acquired the New Stories from the Midwest anthology series (coedited by Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham), which had previously been published by Indiana University Press and Ohio University Press. This quickly led to the idea of starting the New Poetry from the Midwest […]
Poetic and religious impulses have been sibling undertakings since prehistory, and most of the major religious texts are either partially or completely composed in verse. One need merely to consider the Bhagavad-Gita, the Edda, the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, the Quran, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and much devotional poetry […]
1. The weather worsened, and despite myself, I walked back to Natalie’s room where she lay, leaking her woman’s blood and holding the infant whose father I was not. The rain outside was more soothing than ominous, but I have always savored stormy […]
These are people of “(ironically) tiger-striped couch,” of “knowing how people got to be the people they are & how much it cost them,” of coke snorted in bathrooms on immigrant parents’ dimes. Into this milieu we recognize even if we wish we didn’t, in unpredictable […]
[You can read “The Incurable Habit: Jessamyn Smyth on Okla Elliot’s ‘The Boiling Glass’” here.] [1] Despite the uproar all around me my mind elsewhere. I looked over the shoulder of an attractive & perhaps too self-consciously hip young woman & her cell-phone […]
