Author Archive

“I was a house / I was a witch” : Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us.”

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“I was a house. / I was a witch” declares the middle stanza of Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us” from the newest issue of DRUNKEN BOAT. This poem, in my reading, functions to present intermingling transformations that perform whatever an opposite of distillation forecloses.

“No Were There But” : Marwa Helal’s “Poem to Be Read From Right to Left”

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In “Poem to Be Read From Right to Left,” recently published in the newest issue of Winter Tangerine, Helal comes up with a new poetic form: “the Arabic.”

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Jayy Dodd’s “Black Philosophy #3”

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“Black Philosophy #3,” Dodd’s new poem from the first issue of The Shade Journal, poses a series of “if…then…” questioning statements regarding blackness, black boys, death, dead boys, living boys, pretty boys, prettiness, and a manner of interrelating, interlocking, and uncompromising conditions between those terms.

“frank ocean and all black things that disappear on their own”: A Conversation with Jonathan Jacob Moore

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A discussion with Jonathan Jacob Moore regarding Frank Ocean, blackness, queerness, presence/absence, music, and Moore's recent poem "frank ocean and all black things that disappear on their own."

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Joey De Jesus’s “Materia VII”  

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“Materia VII,” the new poem by Joey De Jesus featured in this month’s WILDNESS, an online literary arts journal published in coordination with Platypus Press, uses several relational jumping off points to supercharge the text-scene.

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Wrapped In My Body I Dream”

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Apogee Journal’s new folio “Queer History, Queer Now” acts as an “altar” to “reject the whitewashing, the profit-making, and political tokenizing that warps queer struggles and tragedies.” For this month, I decided to write regarding Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Wrapped In My Body I Dream.”

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Nikki Wallschlaeger’s “Blues for A Bar So Low That It Became a Cage”

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Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of the collection Houses and the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, two arrangements that undercut artifice and underline activation energies. This month, I dove into one of her new poems from the most recent incarnation of The Journal Petra.

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Sarah Sgro’s “Body as a Plant Expanding”

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  I’ve read Sarah Sgro’s poetry for about four years, and remain a consistent witness to its various evolutions and concentrations concerning femininity, food, sexuality, and waste. In the past year, Sgro’s work has flourished, wreaked havoc, and run amok through many journals. Because her pieces keep sharpening their

The Best Poem I Read This Month: “A performance for intimate space with strangers” by Saretta Morgan

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  Saretta Morgan participates in “text-based writing,” and currently attends the interdisciplinary graduate writing program at Pratt Institute. Additionally, she’s a member of the Belladonna* Collective, a feminist avant-garde group founded in New York City. These affiliations begin to orient lenses and traditions through which to read her work; but

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Sade Murphy’s “Entry 098 &/or Monday Night Before Thanksgiving or//Venus & Mars in Libra”

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Sade Murphy pauses time in her prose piece(s) “Entry 098 &/or Monday Night Before Thanksgiving or//Venus & Mars in Libra” in DREGINALD. A series of moments—walking down Grand Street, pivoting on Putnam, taking the bus to Greenpoint—become infused with back-and-forth switches of vision, allowing Murphy to double her text. This doubling