Read Emi Bergquist’s book review on The Beautiful Immunity by Karen An-Hwei Lee and explore what it means to be immune—not just in the biological sense, but in the spiritual, emotional, and linguistic realms.
This post features poems from each of the Headliners of the 13th Annual New York City Poetry Festival: Ilya Kaminsky, Safia Elhillo, Kazim Ali & Katie Farris.
Carve out some you-time and head down to this month’s PTW spot & give this Prompt a free write.
Although Black History Month is coming to a close, we must remember that the influence of Black art and culture in the poetry world and the world beyond deserves acknowledgment and utmost appreciation 24/7/365.
twenty-one ways to prosper as a child of a dying world | Clickbait is a blog designed to shamelessly attract attention to poetry. Using devices typically reserved for online “clickbait” like listicles, how-to’s, trending topics, SEO, hashtags, hyperlinks, hyperbole, sensationalism, puff, and fluff, the poets at The Poetry Society of New York are having a little fun.
Sadhika Ganguli is a rising freshman at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, The Athena Review, For Women Who Roar, The Sheepshead Review, and the Jessie H. Butler Poetry Contest anthology. She is a proud woman of color and poetry is her passion. Writing, in general, has not only gotten her through tough times but has been able to complement the good in her life.
Esther Eidenberg-Noppe (they/them) interned at Youth Speaks Seattle, a non-profit poetry organization for two years, and was on the 2018 team representing Seattle at Brave New Voices, an international poetry-slam competition. Esther has been published in the 2019 anthology “Thriving While Trans” and the Sarah Lawrence College literary magazine Love and Squalor.
Brandon James O’Neil is from New York City and currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Iowa, working remotely from the Upper West Side. His husband—a medical resident at Mount Sinai West—and himself were married in December 2019, roughly three months before the outbreak of COVID-19 and spent the duration of the global pandemic in their studio. Brandon’s poems grew out of those months of isolation, protest, and uncertainty. His work has appeared in Image, Psychological Perspectives, and Plough and his poem "Cats" won the First Line poetry contest from Alexandria Quarterly.
Kevin R. Farrell, Jr. is a New York based artist, poet, and educator whose work has been published in BONED – Every Which Way, Burning House Press, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Adroit Journal, Ink in Thirds Magazine, Foxhole Magazine, Yo-NEWYORK! and others. In 2021 Farrell released Best of the Worst, now in its second pressing, which consists of 20 poems that have risen to the top of the trash heap that is his constant documentation of a life spent toeing the line between spiritual bliss and emotional upheaval. His new book Top of the Heap is scheduled for a June 2021 release. As a recovering addict each day can be a struggle when dealing with the dumpster fire that is modern day existence. Sometimes Farrell attempts to put out the fire, on other days he warms his hands by the flames.
Ash Freeman is a junior at Sarah Lawrence College. They are originally from Miami, Florida but mostly write about their time spent in Michigan and the queer pastoral. They are the Editor-in-Chief of Love & Squalor. Their submission encapsulates their writing as a whole: honest, obsessed with love, and almost grotesque.
Sharon Mesmer's most recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place, was voted "Best of 2015" by Entropy. She's the author of several other poetry books, as well as three fiction collections including Ma Vie à Yonago, in French translation from Hachette. Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition). Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine/The Cut, the Paris Review, and the American Poetry Review. Her current manuscript-in-progress, Even Living Makes Me Die, contains poems dedicated to 37 "under-known" women poets of the Americans, from Canada to Chile, from the 19th century to the present. She teaches creative writing at NYU and the New School.
Not Sure Where To Spend Your Summer Weekend at the NYC PoFest? Let the Tarot Decide! | Clickbait is a blog designed to shamelessly attract attention to poetry. Using devices typically reserved for online “clickbait” like listicles, how-to’s, trending topics, SEO, hashtags, hyperlinks, hyperbole, sensationalism, puff, and fluff, the poets at The Poetry Society of New York are having a little fun.
Halim Madi is a queer Arab poet. He grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, left at 17 to study in Paris and Toronto and worked in London and Sao Paulo. He now lives in San Francisco. Halim is a TED speaker, a product manager at Oculus working on the future of virtual reality, and a poet. In 2019, he asked his friends for crowdfunding support and wrote "Flight of the Jaguar". The story of what happened during these 14 years. The space between being a poet and becoming a poet. The leap of a cat. In 2020, also with friends’ support, he wrote and published "In the Name of Scandal", a collection of poems about sluthood, the immigrant identity, queerness and plants that make you see colors.
Raised on the rural and once-rainy Oregon coast, James Joaquin Brewer now shelters in place in Connecticut while defying the uncloudy but unclear skies of gray above to spark his imagination. A recent publication about his early life in Oregon may be found at the following link: https://thewritelaunch.com/author/james-brewer/ .
Dominque Carrieri wrote the collection of poetry the before & the after to capture the shifts in life before and after the loss of a parent. The poems were compiled after the death of her father, who passed in 2016 to Pancreatic Cancer. When he passed, she recognized a shift in her writing. She no longer related to her work written prior to his death. Years later, she watched her work transform into longing to eventually a fixation with mortality. She knew this collection could not flourish without showcasing both her trauma and the bliss of life before it. So, she chose to let it exist as one stunning experience. The full manuscript has only just begun its submission process to publishers.
Yasin Ertas is a second-year MFA student at The New School, Creative Writing/Poetry. Yasin has been living in NYC for 6 years, and previously studied International Trade in Turkey, Hungary, and Belgium with the Erasmus Program, as well as published a book in Turkey. Yasin’s articles appear in well-known newspapers Milliyet and Radika (one of them is banned because of Yasin’s political beliefs); Yasin’s poems appear in famous magazines Dil ve Edebiyat, KafkaOkur, Ot Dergisi, Kirpi Edebiyat in Turkey.
Grace Maselli studied in New York City at the Writers Studio founded by American poet and author, Philip Schultz. Her work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Poydras Review, Streetlight Magazine and The Penmen Review. Her poem, “Queen of African Violets,” was the 2019 first-place winner in the Jacaranda Poetry Contest sponsored by the Pasco Fine Arts Council and the Cannon Memorial Library at Saint Leo University, St. Leo, FL. Grace lives in the Tampa Bay Area with Sophia, Jackson, Francis, Olive, and Lexilu. Her poem, “What the Hair is Going On?” was published as a mini chapbook by Phfours Press, Ottowa, Canada.
Kayan Tara is an Indian poet and author living in the United States. Kayan’s work touches on the struggles and contradictions of growing up in Mumbai, India, as well as its political and social landscape. During this turbulent time in the United States, Kayan has written about the realization that even in times of division we have more in common than apart.
Mollie Gordon (she/her/hers) is a queer writer, educator, and theatre-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her prose and poetry have been published by Multiplicity Magazine and Love & Squalor, and her plays have been produced by The Bechdel Group and Sarah Lawrence College. She uses her writing to freely explore gender and the natural world, while also analyzing and reimagining the classics. She will graduate next year with a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence.
How fragile is the word “human”? In Joshua Beckman’s new collection, Animal Days , it appears more vulnerable than we would like to admit. Animal Days, published this year by Wave Books, breaks down the syntax through which we compose ourselves as creatures set apart. Branching distinctions, recited by habit, between subject and object, human and inhuman, are all scraped and shorn away from the text, allowing us to reach into the darkness beneath words and encounter a strangeness buried deep in our bodies. Porous, silent, damp—a movement barely sensed: the parts of life from which we’d normally recoil enter our awareness, like the pulse rushing in our wrist—a foreign feeling, always present, but suddenly recognized. Winding along the roots of our grammar like a speckled rot, Beckman’s poems moisten and decay our assumptions, revealing what we are when we are no longer ourselves.
