I grew up in a family that did not tell the story. I am listening to it now: Even the morning you see a robin flattened on the street, you hear another in a tree, the notes they’ve taught each other, bird before bird before we were born. […]
This, my too-weak notice. I am tired with comparing my body to heavy things, of holding death like my grandmother’s house. I left the smile in another poem after a professor said it made no sense. Understand: I am done writing about the black girl emptied. I am […]
In the poetry of Brad Aaron Modlin, the most quotidian experiences – growing up, being carried by a rusty bicycle, and waiting for payday – become a point of entry to to larger questions about reverence, shared experience, and the creation of narrative. For Modlin, the stories we […]
In the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Karen Volkman, and Lisa Jarnot, Jenny Grassl defamiliarizes language in poetry that is at once spontaneous and skillful, playful and erudite. Here, we encounter words that we only thought we knew, rendered suddenly strange as Grassl reimagines their semantic meaning. […]
JP Grasser’s poems are rooted in the “mammoth sense” of direct experience. They are immersed in the physical world while also wryly suspicious of language’s tendency to objectify nature into abstract conceptualizations. In compressed, sculpted language and taut line trajectories, Grasser’s poems resist the desire to make a […]
Jenny Grassl was raised in Pennsylvania, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems appeared in The Boston Review as a runner-up prize selected by Mary Jo Bang. Rhino Poetry, Phantom Drift, Radar Poetry, and The Massachusetts Review have published her poems. Other journals include Ocean State […]
Jenny Grassl was raised in Pennsylvania, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems appeared in The Boston Review as a runner-up prize selected by Mary Jo Bang. Rhino Poetry, Phantom Drift, Radar Poetry, and The Massachusetts Review have published her poems. Other journals include Ocean State […]
The stillborn calf drops to the ground, all wet & good, smelling of life freshly—; out in the fields, the objective fields, winter entrenches itself, frost-heaves between walls of bright feedcorn, so gleeful, mistakenly so—; our best dogwoods lust after a scent, anything, anything that isn’t their own, […]
Ashanti Anderson’s three poems presented here—”Self-Portrait as Overseer,” “Self Portrait in Blackface, and “Resignation” are from her forthcoming manuscript Black Under from Black Lawrence Press in 2021. These are pieces that document atrocities while singing. The poems are powerful as single entities, but they accrue additional potency when […]
We found things in the woods during nature walks in Sally’s American Lit class in high school. Things that meant something to us and things people left behind that came to mean something to us—once a rusty tireless bicycle rim. We brought it back to our classroom and hung it […]