Portside

“The thing about the universe,” writes poet Dan Albergotti, “is that it seems infinite, but really it’s only a ceaseless series of extinctions.”

The late poet Lee Sharkey illuminates varieties of theft—“The CEO,” “The tyrant,” “the thief of memory.”

Writing from personal experience, Lois Fried traces the divide from days of Jim Crow to Black Lives Matter.

One year after people began to quarantine, Robert Perry’s poetry captures the slow realization as one day passes into the next how daydreaming eases the loneliness.

Hayden Saunier’s poem about the moon walk evokes a hidden memory of wartime trauma.

California poet Patrick Daly writes in the wake of January 6, 2021 about “that other House” endangered by a mob or by “An angry man/red and orange like a flame?”

California poet Fred Norman offers a beautiful elegy to Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Connie Post’s remarkable poem illuminates how our culture programs us to grieve for soldiers but accept exploitation of young women.

“There’s a poem in this place--/a poem in America/a poet in every American,” writes Amanda Gorman in a celebration of the varieties of what is an American.

Pultizer-prize winning poet Jericho Brown speaks to this critical moment—“the single item on the agenda”—that inspires hope at “this American hour of our lives.”