Poetry
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June 30, 2020 |
Photo by John Fisher Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The sound of it is fitting. Less sibilant than rice... -
June 29, 2020 |
Photo courtesy of the author for Rachelle 4/27/2020 Our moms were widows before they met our fathers. Their hair blue-black, their hands already chapped, caressed by Inglis die-cast... -
June 16, 2020 |
Photo by Marco Arment / Flickr Sunday morning on the parquet Sunday morning on horseback Sunday morning picking lice from her hair . . . with a rosary and prie-dieu... -
June 1, 2020 |
John Ciardi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Luciano Rebay, and Ivar Ivask after presentation of the award certificate, Norman, Oklahoma, March 14, 1970 / Photo by Jim Lucas Today (June 1) marks the f... -
March 2, 2020 |
Ernesto Cardenal in Santiago, Chile, 2009 / Photo by Roman Bonnefoy Editorial note: The editors of WLT were saddened to hear that Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal passed away... -
February 25, 2020 |
Photo by Stephen Clarkson / Flickr The following essay introduces readers to the early texts that writers produced dealing with the April 21, 2019, bombings targeting Christian places of w... -
February 11, 2020 |
The introductory notes to Quesadilla and Other Adventures (Hawakal Publishers, 2019), edited by Somrita Urni Ganguly, lay the ground plan for the anthology. “Food is history,” writes Ganguly.... -
December 18, 2019 |
Photo by Eric Parker / Flickr A Cuban writer living in the US writes a requiem for Havana, a city of contradictions, to mark its five hundredth year. Havana just turned five hundred.... -
December 17, 2019 |
Photo by T Foz / Unsplash Alphabets of My Heart Because I am from East and West a mother with two alphabets and I must not love one more than the other if they are to grow up and love eac... -
December 11, 2019 |
Photo by Kea Mowat on Unsplash Dear WLT Readers, I am thrilled to offer the following translation of “Eagle Poem” from English to Arabic in honor of poet Joy Harjo who, this year, was... -
December 9, 2019 |
You Will Grow Together in Your Rage, illustration by Meg Lionel Murphy. This piece originally accompanied Barbara Jane Reyes, “Three Tracks from Brown Girl Mixtape” from the Aut... -
November 21, 2019 |
Photo by Ervins Strauhmanis / Flickr 1 We maintain antiquity and elegance on paper; inside we are full of shame. We present heaven and hell on paper; our self-disgust resul... -
November 1, 2019 |
Dorothy Wang of Williams College, Ammiel Alcalay of the Graduate Center City University of New York (CUNY), and Sesshu Foster at the CUNY Graduate Center, March 27, 2018 / Photo courtesy of the a... -
October 28, 2019 |
Many poets, writers, and thinkers have dwelled on the meaning of poetry following great tragedy, with Theodor Adorno’s claim that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural Criticism an... -
October 28, 2019 |
Photo by Bryan Kuwada Aunty says She climbed a ninety-foot cliff in the dark Traced the scars of a long-forgotten waterfall Cried as she felt the green disappearing under her fingertips An... -
October 24, 2019 |
Photo collage courtesy of the author El Matador after Argentina’s World Cup Victory in 1978 La Patria comes dressed in multiple costumes, durin... -
October 23, 2019 |
Georg Rafisch, “headless,” 2015 / Flickr When I lived in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, I made a point of stopping in San Francesco a Ripa whenever I was running errands. The church hous... -
October 22, 2019 |
Perfecto Santiago / Courtesy of the author Culebra, Puerto Rico, 2018 Let us sit in the open air where days I work, my hands shaping a small plane out of sticks. I tell you only wh... -
September 25, 2019 |
Photo: AndyM / Flickr I imagine the crocuses also sometimes come down unexpectedly feverish, spreading their long green leaves through the wrong season. So it’s ... -
August 12, 2019 |
Photo by Shevaun Williams A well-traveled road in our collective consciousness is the question of what it means to be human. Joy Harjo is a master of this examination and delves through layers... -
July 5, 2019 |
Chris Barnes, Egypt, December 2010 / Flickr To Hisham Harbi who said to me: “don’t stay in the shadows” but I didn’t listen Epigraph rushing as always, my shadow jumped... -
June 20, 2019 |
The poet Phoebe Giannisi and WLT Translation Prize (Poetry) winner Brian Sneeden Leaves Inside these articulations the beginnings of language outside of yes and no... -
June 13, 2019 |
Dany Laferrière was elected to the French Academy in 2013. Edwidge Danticat won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.... -
June 11, 2019 |
Paulo Valdivieso, Porto das Hortas / Flickr Portugal was rocked earlier this year by the news that one of the most popular poems attributed to one of the nation’s greatest modern poets, Sophia... -
June 4, 2019 |
Photo: Chandrashekhar Basumatary / Flickr The cover of Rudencio Morais’s collection of prose poems, Os dialetos do Amor (filLetras Editora, 2018; The languages of love), features a wo...
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Recent Posts
Photo by Ben Hershey / Unsplash
John Feinstein, when he wrote The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a...
Photo by John Fisher
Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The...
Photo courtesy of the author
for Rachelle 4/27/2020
Our moms were widows before they met our fathers.
Their hair blue-black, their...
Corona Avenue, Queens / Photos by David Rohlfing
(1) On the longest day of the longest year, I did not sleep. I stood as witness with the...
Photo by Koshu Kunii / Unsplash
Series editor’s note: Kwame Dawes’s poem is a powerful piece to start off the Black Voices series,...
