Ahmed carefully layers Nigerian cultural practices into the poem’s emotional architecture. “Where I come from, silence is how you mourn a man without gray hairs”—the line invokes a northern Nigerian Muslim sensibility. It also hints at the Nigerian pattern of losing young men to violence, religious conflict, insurgency, and conscription.
(reviews)
We seven spent most of our days preparing ourselves for the war that we were sure we would soon see. Broomsticks became rifles and stones became grenades and we practiced clearing rooms of imagined enemies in the sanatorium.
(nonfiction/Ukraine)
My first uprooting took place in 1998. It was autumn in Jamaica, and putting those words together in a sentence feels as strange as I felt when I lived there. When I was six years old, my parents pulled my younger brother and me from the suburban township of Maplewood, New Jersey and relocated us to the coastal city of Kingston, Jamaica.
(nonfiction)
father’s Chevy
station
wagon nostalgia
weekend I am
always in
service to
my failed
marriage’s cream-
colored
cashmere
sweater
(poetry)
Brian Strang combines visual and auditory components to his poem “Songbirds.”
(audiovisual)
Sears Tower stands fast and solidly flies. Over its base no statues try to beautify the essence of its vim: a skeletal trajectory, a bold learp of blackest metal/glass reaching, soaring higher and higher
(poetry)
Daniel Rachel frames an argument about how spectacle can override ideology and historical awareness. In doing so, these examples endorsed showbiz over ideology, but what else is new? There has never been an entertainer who didn’t want to mesmerize.
(reviews)
Sometimes, silence is the way oppression learns to speak fluently in every language. When we were told to sit still, we didn’t just lose movement—we lost voice.
(nonfiction)
My sister is going on a limitless journey
Those flying blue atoms above us
Penetrating our hearts exactly like darkness
(poetry)
this, the poem i cannot
return to
this, the wholehearted
downpour
(poetry)
I don’t know how to hold onto the warmth of the image of Ray picking up the kids, dappled in sunlight, with the statistics of suicide that run through my mind as I think about Lizzie.
(nonfiction)
it was a hundred thousand miles safely tucked away
had been years since its teeth had tasted the lock of his mouth
when they murdered him
it didn’t break no it vibrated
changed from key to tuning fork
death does that you know
(Palestinian Voices)
One morning I once tried to boycott mandatory COVID tests as a small gesture of resistance, but the first day I didn’t show up, I got a text message that same night warning me that there would be consequences. It didn’t say what the consequences would be.
(nonfiction)
His cheek, cool on asphalt, shining before he closed
his eyes: the pigeon’s neck, shimmering
(poetry)
Much more than a litany of tribulations, this book deconstructs the persona that Carrell and women going back to the beginning of Mormonism have been forced to create to endure its grinding mortifications. Unlike most of these women, Carrell extricates herself, but not without a lasting emotional trauma.
(reviews)
Just announced as a finalist for the Forward INDIES Book of the Year 2025, The Plan of Chicago marks Pearce’s foray into publishing a full collection of fiction under his own name—though he’s a ghostwriter by trade and has penned over twenty nonfiction books.
(reviews)
To read Södergran’s work today is to easily contextualize her voice within a feminist discourse, but it also defies being so neatly categorized. What makes her poems feel timeless is exactly their resistance to any niche delineation of time’s cultural productions.
(reviews)
The poems refuse to dramatize feeling when intimacy is already present, letting proximity, stillness, and ordinary action carry the weight. Moments of connection are often pared down rather than heightened. After intimacy is established through shared gestures—errand talk, side-by-side movement, unremarkable speech—“Greenlight” concludes simply: “Nothing much happened.
(reviews)
This identity transformation, and the inherent tensions of being a mother-writer, inform the poet’s search for a medium that can contain the impossibility of it all. Its pulsing, chimeric quality is reflected against, and through, the structure and constraints of poetry.
(reviews)
As an act of space-making, Dandelion is a forum for Bainbridge to let memories reverberate and echo across a “sprawling archive of emotions.” And speaking of archives (and archivists), as a stylist, Bainbridge’s writing deserves comparison with the rhythms and cadences of Carmen Maria Machado.
(reviews)
plant
a single seed
germinate
be
a lusty weed
die out
then again sprout
a life
(poetry)
The speaker’s estrangement from her parents and her ancestral culture carries over to relationships with lovers and friends. The book contains moments of broad and icy humor, which reflect uneasily on her difficulty in forming intimate relationships.
(reviews)
So much of Jillian’s life nowadays feels perfectly fine with Mark. Their one disagreement is what they should’ve done about Hannah. Mark thinks they were too lenient, too oblivious along the way. He always brings up the Halloween when Hannah had just turned sixteen. There were signs back then.
(fiction)
The government, monet notes, will try to spin a different narrative—that of the domestic terrorist, the outside agitator, the paid protestor. That’s why it’s important to write and share, to maintain the presence and livelihood of resistance.
(reviews)
They who love so lawlessly your laws cannot contain them. They who sacrifice so willingly you are willing to sacrifice them.
(nonfiction)
How does one write about the very things that defy language—things like loss, sorrow, not to mention potential words from the past that went unsaid? How does one convey language-defiant notions through language? For Heller, such linguistically impossible truths are conveyed with metaphor and story, but also with silences, approximations, and fragments.
(reviews)
I went to the lakefront at sunrise, but the beach and
sky were empty, and my dear friend
was not there.
(poetry/Palestinian Voices)
If we look more closely, we see the doll’s skin marked by chips in the paint—traces of violence that our girl has survived—her searing blue eyes defiantly looking toward the sky, or at least something higher than where she is now.
(reviews)
The book’s title is derived from the story “Stormchasers,” in which a couple that moved cities constantly compares the two places while trying to establish a routine. They admit to having “hurricane envy” as they realize that a coming storm won’t really impact them, despite their preparations.
(reviews)
in my city, two fallen en route
to a market, eight more
at an intersection
of a hospital, ice
in their cheeks, hair, lips as if
they said goodbye
(poetry)
Another Chicago Magazine 