Results by title

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.” 

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.” 

Poetry tracing the parallel lives of two characters as they grapple with transcendence, selfhood, technology, and desire.

In Silicon Ana: A Quantum Entanglement, two narratives weave across each page: Ana, a stigmatic visionary navigating miraculous healings and supernatural visitations, and Nan, discovering sexuality and selfhood through a found Penthouse magazine. Across seven movements, their stories braid and diverge—hospital beds mirror bedroom paralysis, religious ecstasy meets erotic awakening, strange prophecies echo in both realms. Through tightly wound five-line stanzas, this double helix of consciousness explores possession in all its forms: spiritual, sexual, psychological, and technological. Each stanza creates a chamber where sacred and profane collapse into each other. Written in an era of AI awakening and quantum computing, where consciousness becomes suspect, this collection asks what happens when the experiment becomes self-aware. As Ana ascends toward cosmic transcendence and Nan navigates earthly desire, their entangled fates ask if we are observing one entity being split across an unfathomable divide or two that are bound by invisible threads. Silicon Ana is a fevered meditation on bodies that refuse singular interpretation in an age of infinite possible selves.

Winner of the 2024 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize
 
Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang’s debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic’s answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.