New poetry,
every week

Sign up to get a new poetry playlist in your inbox each week. Youโ€™ll receive set of poems around a different theme, with a focus on contemporary poets. Itโ€™s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Read more about us

Latest Playlist

CRUEL/CRUEL

๐˜Š๐˜™๐˜œ๐˜Œ๐˜“/๐˜Š๐˜™๐˜œ๐˜Œ๐˜“ย is a collection of poems that seeks to radically deconstruct language in order to respond to theย unimaginable cruelties of living under the muddied boot of white heteropatriarchy. In the collection, Blackย musical tradition, queerness and race coalesce to emphasize the archival and documentary as intrinsic to ourย personal and collective survivals. It was critical for me to craft this collection into a hybrid visual and literaryย object. The visual is integral in the deconstruction and queer renewal of the, at times, dizzying and mystifyingย language found on the page.ย ๐˜Š๐˜™๐˜œ๐˜Œ๐˜“/๐˜Š๐˜™๐˜œ๐˜Œ๐˜“ย asks not that you understand it, butย feelย it-- wholly. Let it sing toย you.ย 

ย 

โ€” Dior J. Stephens

View playlist to continue reading

Featured on April 17, 2023

Body Poem I

๐˜‰๐˜ฐ๐˜ฅ๐˜บ ๐˜—๐˜ฐ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฎ ๐˜ is an attempt at visualizing that which cannot be in the book. The body traces the page, sits, laments, obsesses, delights, and ultimately reveals the poem through interior and exterior labor. Rather than the poem itself being revealed to the viewer/reader, ๐˜‰๐˜ฐ๐˜ฅ๐˜บ ๐˜—๐˜ฐ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฎ ๐˜ points towards the poet/artist in their continuous relationship to language. The body itself is made up of the possibilities of language wordings, soundings, and writings, and as these possibilities accumulate, the poet is further consumed and encased in the mantle of language, which propels them towards the poem. It is through these representative images that the life behind the page begins to make itself known.

ย 

โ€” Tyler Little

View playlist to continue reading

Featured on April 10, 2023

Glory Hole

Kim Hyun,ย ๐˜Ž๐˜ญ๐˜ฐ๐˜ณ๐˜บ ๐˜๐˜ฐ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆย (Translated from the Korean by Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan)

ย 

Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kimโ€™s fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making. His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures. They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithetical to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns. After all, like LGBTQ+ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence. Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyunโ€™s form.ย All the "notes" are the author's own, even when attributed to others.ย ๐˜Ž๐˜ญ๐˜ฐ๐˜ณ๐˜บ ๐˜๐˜ฐ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆย invites readers into a very queer world.ย 

ย 

South Korean authorย Kim Hyunย debuted as a poet in 2009 when his five poems including โ€˜Blow Jobโ€™ were featured in the quarterlyย ๐˜‘๐˜ข๐˜ฌ๐˜ฌ๐˜ข ๐˜š๐˜ฆ๐˜จ๐˜บ๐˜ฆ. Since then, Kim has published several poetry and essay collections. He has also co-authored a feminist novel collectionย ๐˜๐˜ช๐˜ด๐˜ช๐˜ต๐˜ฐ๐˜ณ๐˜ด ๐˜ข๐˜ต ๐˜‹๐˜ข๐˜ธ๐˜ฏ, a queer novel collection ๐˜“๐˜ช๐˜ง๐˜ฆ ๐˜๐˜ด ๐˜ˆ๐˜ญ๐˜ธ๐˜ข๐˜บ๐˜ด ๐˜ฐ๐˜ฏ ๐˜ต๐˜ฉ๐˜ฆ ๐˜‰๐˜ณ๐˜ช๐˜ฏ๐˜ฌ ๐˜ฐ๐˜ง ๐˜Š๐˜ฐ๐˜ญ๐˜ญ๐˜ข๐˜ฑ๐˜ด๐˜ช๐˜ฏ๐˜จ, and the young adult queer anthology,ย ๐˜š๐˜ฐ ๐˜ž๐˜ฆ ๐˜“๐˜ฐ๐˜ท๐˜ฆ.ย Kim has received the Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature and Kim Jun-seong Literary Award.

View playlist to continue reading

Featured on April 3, 2023

Second Nature

This is a condensation of a chapbook, Second Nature, itself assembled from scraps left over from a now (of course) abandoned novel. It's about the usual things: sex, youth, the internet, the suburbs, habits (good and/or bad).


--Elena Comay del Junco

View playlist to continue reading