Translated by Yuemin He, “End of the Year Poem, 2020” by Zhihao Zhang begins where many of us begin our days (regularly, but perhaps especially during a global pandemic): looking at our phones. This mundane act gives way to a reflection that, like the year 2020 itself, is filled with rote action, uncertainty, and contradiction.
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Titling is sometimes the easiest, sometimes the hardest part of crafting a poem—a process that seems shrouded in both mystery and luck. Five poets share their perspectives.
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The speaker of Dev Murphy’s hybrid piece “The Hoard” uses the words of literary figures to examine and reexamine love and desire, creating a hoard within the text itself, which she reshapes throughout the piece.
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This poem’s form is a sonnet-and-a-half that drives the reader onward; in the end, we’re left in the middle.
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Contributor Kaveh Bassiri describes his process writing the poems in his chapbook Elementary English, two of which appeared in our fall issue.
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(To use the PDF embedder to see both poems, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) See more...
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In this video essay, Barbara Tran describes the inspiration behind her poem “Red O” (published in Issue 17.2) against the visual backdrop of two circling hawks.
Read More“Two Moments Above and Below,” like many stories, begins with a bird—but instead of the singular, symbolic flash of color that many birds seem to be in books and movies, the opening pigeon is iridescent, indefinable.
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In this twist on a creation myth, R. Cross’s “A Young Woman Made Up of Dirt” explores self-definition and womanhood through the speaker’s musings on her formation and destruction.
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Contributor Kailyn McCord on the experiences behind her essay in our pages and on crafting subjects in nonfiction.
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