In the spring of 2020, the editors of Tupelo Press announced an open call for chapbook-length folios that addressed themes of illness, contagion, pandemic, sheltering-in-place, isolation, wellness, and public health. We were overwhelmed by the response. In a few months’ time, we received nearly 1200 submissions from around […]
The highway goes lonely. Mad want for hands clenched around any kind of steerable wheel. My brother learns to drive during the Pandemic. I am the one to teach him. I like the roads lonely, he tells me, but also: how long will it be like this? I […]
Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Thrush, Hobart, Sixth Finch, Threepenny Review, Crab Creek Review, and Subtropics, among others. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize and is forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2021. Elsewhere, her most recent […]
Your city still had the world in it hosting the Snow and Ice Exposition at the convention center all under one roof, peeling glass off the harbor from concrete and brownfield unbuildable and damp, slicing equal portions of shine for the day boiling over. Surface […]
Through the word—which is already a presence made of absence—absence itself comes to be named —Jacques Lacan Our lives are lived toward what we cannot name— There are no words for things not having words. There are no days in which there is […]
During the pandemic, there are no solutions, but God is a meaningful increment. We remember October, when it was fires that we anticipated. The wind. Experience is a strangely conjugated verb when no one knows who is sick, was sick, will be sick. We had […]
JinJin Xu is a filmmaker and writer from Shanghai. She has received honors from The Poetry Society of America, NYU, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. Her chapbook, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, was selected by Aria Aber for the Own Voices Chapbook Prize and […]
between worlds with eyes half closed in the heat she walks uphill in the middle of a stone path wearing a pale green summer dress, the color of leaves she moves without haste in Mithymna sunlight past her dying all times, all places, all trees and […]
It’s that particular lack of sound that makes you feel so alone you want to be able to deny everything you believe and just start a conversation with a friend dead more than a year. You can’t say what he would think of loneliness […]
What does one do with the pond that drowns a child? Beyond the obvious things, I mean. Of course the cops should circle the water in yellow, beginning where the child entered the mirror and stretching the ribbon sapling to sapling, waist-high. And if no one […]