Portside

Phillips County, Arkansas, hometown of the most lynching, inspired the poet Gerry Sloan to remember the tragedy at Elaine a century ago.

“I want to say their names,” says California poet Patrick Daly about children killed in the classroom, not as balm, but to stress our “obstinate coming back…the relentless heart.”

“Chemicals were not the answer,” says the Massachusetts poet Katley Demetria Brown. “They were the cause.”

Poet Jennifer Elise Wang gives the inside scoop about sex workers and other exploited workers.

As war returns to eastern Europe, the Croatian-born poet Mirna Hirschl depicts a personal sorrow.

In America, land of constant real estate deals, a Black woman appraises some hidden costs in the buying and selling of houses.

They say you can’t go home again, but the Supreme Court says otherwise. Peter Neil Carroll’s Before Roe offers a glimpse of “normal” from the bad old days.

Amy Soricelli’s poetry captures the grit of The Bronx: the passing “radio from an open car window” or a “random gunshot.”

Grief, anxiety of more to come, infiltrates an ordinary family in Rachel Mallalieu’s poem.

Poet Susan Browne depicts the despair of our times, a sense of hopelessness, the feeling that the future will be even worse than these dismal days.