New in PIOnline
Browse a complete table of contents from our 25th Anniversary Issue!
FEATURED: From our 25th Anniversary issue, readings by Ellen Bass and Kwame Dawes, and Chana Bloch on translation.
REVIEWS: Arthur Kayzakian on Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive and more!
POETRY: New poems from Katharyn Howd Machan and Rob Carney.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Celia Dropkin, Liao Yiwu, Ben Riggs, and others on the tenderness of family!
…and much more!
Dispatches
- On Overwhelm: What Am I to Do but Know These Things?
“I’m overwhelmed. It is hard to have compassion for myself. Unless I learn how to sit and wait, I make myself sick with remorse and self-blame and unworthiness. I cast arrows into myself as a way of doing something. The poetry, this poem, reminds me to be kind to me.” | by David Keplinger - Mythmaking in the Modern World
“I want the poems to transcend what has already been written, transcend the reader’s limited knowledge, to a universal recognition: to feel the thumping heart of the goddesses, the blood thickening in their veins, the indecision of a hovering foot.” | by Vandana Khanna - Ukrainian Feature: Words for War
“For many of the poets, the war is not some distant event one hears about in the papers. It is part of their personal history”| poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky
From the Archives
- To My Son Who Gave Me Light Blue Beads“But it seems to me, I can still please/A nineteen-year-old boy, like you,/Like this, the way I wear these beads” | by Celia Dropkin
- For My Daughter“For you, Miao Miao, my daughter,/a sign of the cross.” | by Liao Yiwu
- Uncle Jim“His feet leapt inches from God-given ground./His smile was toothy, laugh snapped toothy joy./His head—his heart—his head was tightly wound:” | by Ben Riggs
- My Mother’s Memory“We live on separate planets now,/And she mulls and mulls,/Wanting to join me in my world,/Where sometimes I’m a son, sometimes not,” | by C.G. Hanzlicek
- Mama’s Work“Her work/in the quiet corners of barns on the hay, on hot days/when locusts launch themselves out of thickets.” | by Santee Frazier
- Hello Brother“Sometimes in these Bengali summers/When dust sticks to our skins/And the crows shit on our heads/We bond like hydrocarbons,” | by Zubair Ahmed
Poetry
- It Was the Coffee in the Mornings
“the smell somehow staying with me//well beyond his walking into the living room naked” | by Allen Shadow - Without Her
“her fine long tail waving a thin farewell/as both flew away from my life.” | by Katharyn Howd Machan - Back When Water Was an Element
“since we couldn’t just walk across a lake,/the bed of it cracked now, bed of it dust,//dance partner of the wind” | by Rob Carney
Reviews
- You Can’t Go Home Again
Where Land Is Indistinguishable from Sea by Helena Mesa | reviewed by Robert Lang - “You Are In No Position to Criticize Anyone”
From From by Monica Youn | reviewed by Mariam Ahmed - What Hope Looks Like When It’s Cut for Survival
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris | reviewed by Arthur Kayzakian
Interviews
- “Here’s my Sukun”
On stillness as punctuation, the pause before moving forward, a parent’s death, aftershocks, and what’s next | Blas Falconer talks to Kazim Ali - The Poetics of Climate Dystopia
On motherhood, climate anxiety, and the (dis)comfort of writing in form | Anna Gasaway talks to Claire Wahmanholm - Of Things Never Told Before
On myths and muses, radical artifice, genre switching, and the love of children’s poetry | Joseph Thomas talks to Neil Philip
from our 25th Anniversary Issue
- Les Negres de Paris
“…Every back, / it seems, is a blood neighbor” | Kwame Dawes - The Lesser Gods
“But what about all the modest / neglected deities–the overlooked” | by Ellen Bass - The Assignment
“the poem gripped me and would not let go until I’d turned it into English” | Chana Block on her first translation.