These past few weeks, with their own wild and discordant sense of time, have felt like an invitation to reflect, to look back and find the good. We asked our readers to identify some of their favorites from the Featured Poetry we published in 2019.
By Alan Chazaro
“Pocho Boy Meets World” is a Latinx poetry column written by California poet, Alan Chazaro. Join him as he eats his share of quesadillas and uses broken Spanish in hopes of connecting more deeply with what it means to be a U.S. Latinx writer in Latin America. This month, he’s exploring Brazil.
By W.M. Lobko
“Happy Birthday. A nebula based on your eye // exploding explodes far above on the surface. / It doesn’t bother the sea life.”
“The dream is back: I search the BC wilds for my father, bargaining with that impenetrable landscape, our god, to let me find him alive. Tonight, I am lost in a blizzard and I have to choose to forego looking for him in order to live. I have to choose to live.”
By Betsy Brown
“When I think of you, / I wish I could fix things. I think of radios, // stars that shot and fell. Dented spotlights.”
By Kim Harvey
For March’s Poetry We Admire, we hunted down poems with lion and lamb imagery— poems that are, in turn, fierce and tender.
By Lorrie Ness
“thinness compressed her body into braille. / at the pool she read herself by touch // & drank diet coke / inside a fairy ring of bottles.”
By Grace Wagner
“He shows you how // to slit the skin, open the abdomen of a cow / and reach in, extract the calf. First he takes off his wedding ring.”
By Alan Chazaro
“Pocho Boy Meets World” is a Latinx poetry column written by California poet, Alan Chazaro. Join him as he eats his share of quesadillas and uses broken Spanish in hopes of connecting more deeply with what it means to be a U.S. Latinx writer in Latin America. This month, he’s exploring Brazil.