Browse features from previous issues:
Dismantling Rage: On Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider
Years ago, when I was a young Black woman barely recognizable to myself because of the churn of heat and anger just beneath my surface, I found the writings of Audre Lorde. It was the universe, or the ancestors, or intuition that brought Audre Lorde to me, a Black woman, a Black woman writer, and a Black mother.
“Renascence”: Edna St. Vincent Millay Today
“We think back through our mothers,” as Virginia Woolf famously said. I think Edna St. Vincent Millay should be seen as one of our poetic mothers, along with poets like H. D. and Muriel Rukeyser. Swept under the rug of modernism and disdained in MFA programs, a renascent Millay looks surprisingly current. She sounds a lyrical battle cry for women’s freedom, for social justice, for the nuances of human emotion, and for the loveliness our monetized culture has trashed...
Poetry & Democracy: Khaled Mattawa on Whitman’s Democratic Vistas
In his essay Democratic Vistas (1871) Walt Whitman writes, “Democracy... is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”
Richard Blanco on His Poem “Mother Country” and His Work Today
Excerpted from How to Love a Country: Poems (Beacon Press, 2019).
Assuming the Mask: Persona and Identity in Ai’s Poetry
On the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Ai's poetry collection, Killing Floor, which received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1978 and is being reissued by Tavern Books this month, Major Jackson re-examines the celebrated poet's work.
Eileen Myles and Solmaz Sharif: A Conversation Across Generations
Eileen Myles moved from Boston to New York City to become a poet in 1974.
Late Humanism
So much of what makes art interesting and human are its particulars. Everyone comes from somewhere, in time and place, and it is both inane and gross to pretend that this does not matter, when it matters more than almost anything.
Paul Laurence Dunbar at 150
The year 2022 marks the 150th anniversary of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s birth.
Entering the Whirlpool
When I went to the University of Virginia’s bookstore to pick up semester readings for Fall 1999, what I noticed about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was how big it was.
Ange Mlinko on “The Waste Land”
Among the medieval artifacts in the British Museum is an example of what’s called an acoustic pot.
Kinship of Clay
What’s in a name? Everything. It’s identity; the label we live, love, and, all too often, hate by. Fame, fortune, failure, and infamy make names and then destroy them.
Poetry for the People
While examining Pat Parker and June Jordan’s archive during the summer of 2022, I found the presence of poet and activist Janice Mirikitani everywhere.