Spoken word poetry asks for something quite rare among contemporary poets: a willingness to crawl out of the writing cave to stand on stage and perform. Fearless Blythe Baird creates her written work teeming with sound and rhythm,... Read More

We reckon that nine generations in Appalachia is long enough for a place to get in the bones of a family, and that kinheritance has marked Kari Gunter-Seymour with an intuitive feel for one of America’s most isolated and peculiar... Read More

Not all poets are storytellers, not even close, but all of them wish they were, wish they had a better understanding of how words and images bind spells. Wesley McNair is the author of nine collections of stories in the shape of poems.... Read More

A child of Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, a mother of three in Bolivia, Emily Bludworth de Barrios comes at her work from all directions at once, with a frenzied takedown of parental angst, violence against women, existential hopelessness,... Read More

In this masterclass in effervescent wordcraft, even as it ranges through troubled terrain, Sharon Dolin proves to be a poet for the love of sanity. Seven collections of poetry, a Pushcart Prize, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts... Read More

Truth spoken by poets matters more simply because the poet settles for nothing but the truth, so help her Veritas, daughter of Saturn. Such vigilance is arduous, and as a queer, Indigenous Hawaiian, No’u Revilla is as singular a voice... Read More

Inspiration: handy stuff, if you can find it. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta secured theirs in the revolutionary struggles of Chicana feminists and Spain’s Post-Franco queer punk movement, so this collection doesn’t play nice with fascists... Read More

Careening towards the apocalypse, we’d be choosy about sitting shotgun next to anyone but a poet. Who else could keep the conversation lively with brimstone on the breath? C. Russell Price, keep that seat open for us, will ya? A Lambda... Read More