It is not my aim to name the spark that makes a poem a poem, but I can show you what is wild and wandering and wondering. I hope when you read these poems, your curiosity ignites. I hope they make you look up at the world around you and seek out its tenderness. I hope they fill you with a righteous rage or become the salve you needed on a hard day. I chose these poems for their breadth and spellwork. Let them transform you, even briefly.
Spring 2020
“Book of Mild Regrets” by Mary Biddinger
“& the white girl tells me i need to marry a Latino man so that my kids can be the world” by Em Dial
“Immigrant Elegy for Ávila” by Mónica Gomery
“all the girls standing in the line for the bathroom” by Marlin M. Jenkins
“Masculine Sonnet” by Sreshtha Sen
“salat during deportation proceedings” by Dulie Tahat
“hearsay” by Renia White
Fall 2019
“Honey” by Allison Adair
“An Accommodation” by Sandra Beasley
“God Letter” by CM Burroughs
“Marigolds of Fire” by Ama Codjoe
“Buying Back-to-School Supplies” by Matthew Guenette
“Professor Marva Stewart’s Funeral Service at Gilbert-Lambuth Chapel, Paine College” by Kamilah Aisha Moon
“Gather” by Jess Smith
“The Most Important Word in This Language” by Analicia Sotelo
Spring 2019
“Upon Meeting My Father for the First Time, My Mother Thinks—” by Bailey Cohen
“Motel, Oregon” by Sophie Klahr
“Something Quiet” by Rosalie Moffett
“Casida of the Branches” by C. C. Reid
“For the Doctor's Records” by Clint Smith
Fall 2018
“Aubade in the Old Apartment” by Leila Chatti
“Get Out of the Goddamn Car,” by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
“On the Haunted Hayride with Audrey” by Keetje Kuipers
“white girl interrogates her recurring dreams” by Marty McConnell
“The Earth Is Rude, Silent, Incomprehensible” by Jacques J. Rancourt
“December at Faribault Prison” by Michael Torres
Spring 2018
“Crack” by Geoff Anderson
“Sunken Place Sestina” by Ashley M. Jones
“White Earth” by Erika Meitner
“Fawn” by Susannah Nevison
“In Praise of the Names of Things” by Chelsea Wagenaar
Contributing editor Ruth Awad is an award-winning Lebanese-American poet whose debut poetry collection Set to Music a Wildfire (SIR Press 2017) won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Sixth Finch, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Diode, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Epiphany, BOAAT Journal, and elsewhere.