Portside

The Alabama-based poet Ashley M. Jones has a thing or two to say about “redlining” (aka housing discrimination).

Poet and Army veteran Karen Skolfield sees sexual assault in the military that “no one takes…seriously.”

An encounter with the mutilated statue of a freed slave leads the California poet Joseph Zaccardi to consider the names of those left nameless.

“He does not represent us,” writes poet Marge Piercy about the misogynist Senator, but knows the “clichés that light up brains.”

As the matter of gun control remains unresolved, the comments of poet Wendell Berry seem particularly relevant.

Is Jeffrey Epstein worth another conspiracy theory? Poet Lee Rossi touches the dark side of too much media speculation.

“Outside from Inside,” words found in a letter written from a Japanese American concentration camp, are transformed by New York poet Anne Whitehouse.

“Someone with wings,” writes the critic Elizabeth Willis, “may be angelic, but the figure also embodies the predatory power of a country—the one we live in…”

Tennessee poet Ben Weakly sings of a soldier’s valor as sacrifice for the living.

The New Jersey-born poet Kyle Dargan adds irony to our reckless consumer economy, tracing the impulse to a juvenile urge to grow up.