Renee Kalagayan
In “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula,” Franny Choi separates her own peninsula-shaped poem—like Korea—into two halves, separated by a parallel. A contrapuntal poem, each half can be read on its own, but together, they become stronger, more unified. The reader discovers these small lives have more in common than they do differences. Despite this commonality, conflict abounds, and thus Koreans, “live— // like ghosts, reverberate. The bad memories / in the body? They climb to the surface.” The tension, though disheartening, is nothing new. But Choi does not leave her readers comfortless, clinging to heritage, family, and hope for dear stupid life.
Read Franny Choi’s poem, “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula”
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Anna Pia
“Stacking Cistern My Bones on Top of Your Bones on Top of Your Bones” is a poem that makes me feel seen. I, too, am not an optimist. I, too, often lie awake at night, worrying about war, violence, fascist politics, skyrocketing rents and livelihoods threatened by billionaires and AI. This is why I am so grateful for poets like Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Like a metta meditation, their poem is a reminder to hold each other with loving kindness and light. It might not stop horrible things from happening, but it lessens the pain to know that we are in this together.
Read Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poem, “Stacking Cistern My Bones on Top of Your Bones on Top of Your Bones”
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Leslie Goetsch
Jay Despande lays out a dilemma all human beings face: the paradox of choosing to be most vulnerable by sleeping at night, in the dark, where nothing can be recognized. Emerging from the dark safety of the womb to claim, “My way, my wail/My ladle” the infant can recognize from the start that the light, the “heaven on the ceiling” is where he can feel safety and love, in the form of his mother, “his other.” Even though he doesn’t want to sleep in the dark, he does, because “love made me do it.” The human experience begins in this shocking reversal of conditions, and we never really get over it.
Read Jay Despande’s poem, ”Sleep Training”
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Desiree Hensley
I think of the poem “Janus Faces the Canned Goods Aisle” by Max Gregg every time I get milk in the grocery store. Its final image of a hand, only a hand, pushing the milk forward, lingers. It calls to mind the ghostly presence in the supermarket, the illusion of the ‘horn of plenty.’ It makes us call it what it is: an illusion, crafted out of tactics like ‘facing,’ which we learn about in the epigraph. The true genius of the poem is in the title. The reference to Janus, who is the double-headed god of passageways, of thresholds. And a threshold is the place you leave from, and return. It will always have two sides. Bringing Janus into the conversation around a convenience store emphasizes the hidden labor of such spaces.
Read Mack Gregg’s poem, ”Janus Faces the Canned Goods Aisle”
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Evan Rodriguez
I feel like the animal Chan is describing. I am also not white, so the way she describes white people as shiny, pristine objects, carefully arranged, resonates with me. They’re things put up on a shelf to admire, not for touching. Their fragility requires a certain amount of respect and distance. Delicate, spotless, they’re easily corruptible by anything non-white.
My favorite part is probably how the breeders are less discerning than the horses—this idea of the horses themselves discriminating about who they’d breed with—but the breeders thankfully come in—this unconscious force of attraction pushing the author towards white horses like a deus ex machina—to breed them together, against the white horses’ wishes.
I was inspired by the cultured world of show horses and breeders in “Pageantry” and wrote a poem about having sex with a white woman on a piano. Here are the first two stanzas:
No No No
I won’t have sex on the piano.
Someone might come in
upset we’re playing Chopin wrong.
Exclaiming this is indecent.
White keys mingled with black
hips lodged between your thighs, calves
straddling my neck.
I was really influenced by the focus on body parts and self-consciousness in Chan’s poem, as well as the fun, absurd imagery that “Pageantry” maintains from beginning to end.
Read Jody Chan ’s poem, ”Pageantry”
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Bill Neumire
It’s gorgeously everything; we can’t ever have it again; and only rarely do we even sense it—such is the “perfect moment” of Leila Chatti’s “I Went Out to Hear” (an “out” that is not “in” but also, like a candle, is extinguished in order to see and be the natural darkness). Fittingly poetic to begin with “The sound of quiet,” and though paradoxical, who hasn’t sensed (I hope) when the noises around us begin to fade away, when our performative personalities fade? Ironically, the page’s linguistic chorus of assonance (those long e’s!) and consonance (those stark k’s!) echo and chatter throughout these brief lines, sounds that live, like the poem’s unseen bats, as vibrations in the dark. Meanwhile, “obscene,” the self-critical speaker calls their own “breathing” in this sacred silence. The natural scene is impurified by the yearning, imperfect I that can’t help itself, as the lines lengthen toward abstract nostalgia: “[it] would only hurt me / to remember and never / live again.” And then that revelatory apostrophe signaling gratitude and regret at once for a life so subtly Edenic that the speaker hasn’t been able to grasp what a blessing it’s been all along, and grasping it now, in hindsight, is both a comfort and a curse.
Read Leila Chatti’s poem, ”I Went Out to Hear”
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Amlanjyoti Goswami
I love this poem for the manner in which it blurs fact and fiction, the dead and alive, poetry and story. Each fragment stands on its own and together make a fine story. There is lyric in snow; there is pathos; there is tribute, and most of all, fond remembrance for a fellow poet, while they are discussing the genius of their age. Above all, the poem is fun. It is funny in a grim, eye-watering way, even as there is no climax in Venice and even if you reach out for the atlas to discover Novosibirsk.
Read Kevin Prufer’s poem, ”In Siberia”
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