Please don’t try this at home—penning fifty gothic memories in individual poems as a memoir—unless you’re comfortable being known as Father Goose, live in a tree house, write for the likes of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and... Read More

When she’s raising a young child, a mother’s day often finds her of two minds: one, not so different from other women; the other, sharing the eyes, ears, and minute-by-minute miracles that come with her flesh and blood experiencing... Read More

In early thirteenth-century Japan, calligrapher Fujiwara no Teika chose one hundred poems of solitude, nature, aging, loneliness, beauty, and desire from one hundred poets of the previous five centuries—Hyakunin Isshu—a collection... Read More

Poetry must come from somewhere that is more than the sum of family, race, education, history, culture, gender, pain, and passion. Every poet, of course, draws on as much, but why is it that so many Black women poets’ where-from place... Read More

No American education should be considered complete without a visceral understanding of plantation life for teenage Black girls in the slavery centuries before the Civil War, when molestation and sexual trauma were so routine that... Read More

It’s not easy being Keetje—so truthstakingly, heartgapingly, cliffedgingly vulnerable and live. The experience of her poetry feels dangerous, capable of triggering changes both lasting and longed for. That she recognizes love as... Read More

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the least-populated region in the lower 48. Walking a riverbank, you are more likely to meet a black bear, wolf, bobcat, or whitetail deer than you are a human—which is why M. Bartley Seigel calls the UP... Read More

If you walk long enough to see your hair turn gray, fending brush from your face through starless nights, note taking to the cadence of seasons, your poetry will reach great heights—that is, if Kelly Shepherd’s modus operandi holds... Read More