Poetry Contributor: Molly Spencer

Molly Spencer’s starkly lovely collection of poems, If the House, speaks from an undeniably domestic perspective, but her subjects range from the deeply personal to the global and widely felt. Poems navigate the line between memory and presence and explore many kinds of absence: stillness, silence, white space, the foreclosure of a house, the dissolution…

Poetry Spotlight: Keetje Kuipers

Sweet and bittersweet in turns, Keetje Kuiper’s All Its Charms (2019, BOA Editions) is a collection of love notes: reflections on time spent with her wife and daughter, quiet moments of observation, pockets of domestic calm. From this place of tenderness, Kuiper’s intelligent poems peel away self-importance and culpability to acknowledge larger, looming conflicts, from the…

Poetry Spotlight: Eugene Gloria

 Contributor Spotlight: An Interview with Eugene Gloria Eugene Gloria’s explosive fourth collection of poems, Sightseer in This Killing City (Penguin, 2019), begins with “Implicit Body,” a poem that bursts into an invocation of “this legend of my betrayals, my disloyalty to my origins,” a litany of sorts that moves us toward this striking stanza that prophesizes…

Poetry Spotlight: Anne Barngrover

Anne Barngrover’s Brazen Creature is a fierce contemplation on the relationship between pain and yearning. The pain of the body. The pain of loss. The pain of the woods. The collection refers to our sufferer as The Waiting Girl, whose hair is always singed, and the men throughout are varying degrees of disappointment. Despite a familiar…

Poetry Spotlight: Jill McDonough

Jill McDonough‘s newest collection of poetry, Here All Night, is a unique mix of free verse and sonnets that invites readers into tales of domesticity and community, though not everything is joyous and kind. In Here All Night, McDonough makes brilliant use of humor to analyze the economy, gender discrimination, and the penal system of America. With…

Poetry Spotlight: Katie Peterson

In her most recent poetry collection, A Piece of Good News (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Katie Peterson generously gathers the elements in our lives that can often feel most disparate: the private and public, the present and past, the personal and the universal. While the poems are almost always grounded in personal experience—driving around town with parents,…

Poetry Spotlight: Diana Khoi Nguyen

Ghost of, selected by Terrance Hayes as the winner of Omnidawn’s 2017 Open Book Contest, is the first book of poetry by poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen, and was named a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. The book is an unflinching examination of the suicide of Nguyen’s brother and…

Poetry Spotlight: Jeanne Larsen

What Penelope Chooses is a feminist retelling that gives Homer’s Odyssey a modern setting while still retaining the core mythos. In this journey through language jam-packed with allusion, Jeanne Larsen creates a genealogy of women in the Odyssey and their subversive forces. We hear their laments as they try to make their own choices in a world defined by men and a war…