David Gullette recommends Joseph “Jay” Featherstone’s third collection of poems, Rising Out of Nowhere (Fenway Press, 2023). “This collection shows an experienced poet at the top of his game. Particularly sharp is the sense of place—in his case, Gloucester’s Eastern Point—where he watches as ‘A great Atlantic roller swings / toward land, flowing, green. /…
We are witnessing a war—multiple wars—whose scale and devastation are overwhelming. Every day, pictures of maimed or murdered children, carried in the arms of their grieving families, flicker on our social media timelines. Nearly every post asks the same questions: Does our suffering not matter? Who will bear witness to our loss? To lose a…
She stands with other statues and shattered friezes like the debris of some blast or the wreckage of a sunken ship. Her pious gaze and the elegant fold of her robe add a touch of pride to the centuries contouring her face and truncated body. The incarnated goddess of death still stands, dignified and somewhat…
I’ll never forget the day I saw my first massacre. Or, rather, its fresh aftermath. It might’ve been in the context of the Ambazonian Crisis. It might’ve been Boko Haram–related. But at the beginning of the video, there’s a mountain of clothed corpses, bare feet and arms smeared in red clay, protruding from the tangle…
It’s an old garden story; it started with the fall. I was making my way across some stones that my husband had set, into a section of my garden that was obscured by weeds—big, shoulder-high ones, upstart saplings, overeager goldenrod, a mass of sprawlers and climbers like wild grape vine and poison ivy. I was…
In nonfiction, our winner is J Lazar, for her piece “The End of What We Know.’” Of the essay, nonfiction judge Meghan O’Rourke says, “In formally exploratory and lyrical prose, the author explores the stakes—and losses—entailed in migration. If migration is the ‘end of what we know,’ the essay asks, then how can nonfiction adequately…
The youngest, my only sister, quaked in the bunk bed overhead the night the eldest brother left for college. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “The family is breaking up,” she sobbed. A murmuration of starlings floods the sky one late November sunset. Twisting in dark, iridescent waves in midair, hundreds of thousands of birds move in…
The last prison the feds sent me to had been built on the side of a bluff in the middle of the desert. An island in a sea that had dried up around 252 million years ago. Originally, it was an Air Force outpost during the Cold War. However, during my time, it held felons…
The nurse tells me I have ten minutes to eat the radioactive eggs. “You can eat the toast, too, but that’s optional.” Then in thirty minutes, they will take the first scan. She leaves me alone with my paper cup of eggs and a plastic spoon. “Put some salt on them,” my great-grandmother Minerva says….
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