By Caroline White, Poetry Editor

The following featured poems appear in our new Spring 2024 Issue 115. Subscribe today to read more!

“Prime Rib Resting” by Jacob Schepers caught our attention by being a small poem with a big scope and a concise, tangible series of images. The line breaks themselves create meaning in this poem through their dissonance, working against the grammar in a fascinating way and thereby adding an additional layer of complexity to the work. Schepers uses syntax as a vehicle to drive the poem without needing any punctuation; thus, the energy of the poem continues to build without pause, allowing seamless movement from the specificity of a bleeding piece of meat on a plate to the view of an entire planet. We appreciate how the subtle violence of the meat as the first and primary image strategically and literally bleeds through the rest of the poem, and I love the tone of the final movement and its indication of desperation presented in a way that’s self-aware and realistic.

Martha Paz-Soldan’s imaginative “Funicular” arrested us through its ability to create a universe through lyricism. This poem is deeply language driven and the tone carries the poem wonderfully – the reliance on language alone showcases Paz-Soldan’s feat of poetic athleticism. The speaker presents us with a montage of images and brief but powerful glimpses of the self. The cleanliness of this poem is astounding: every word, phrase, and punctuation mark feels perfectly placed. However, within that landscape of precision, the poem still manages to be surprising and exciting in each line. The quiet ending, for example, of the fishermen in their knit hats beautifully juxtaposes the shock of the man dropping his glass eye in the water cup. I appreciate that the poem also takes the risk of using the second person, resulting in a slightly larger understanding of the speaker that elevates the poem.

We loved the narrative-based strangeness in “Valentine’s Day with My Octopus Lover” by Benjamin S. Grossberg. The creativity of the dramatic situation itself immediately piqued our interest, even just through the title alone. This poem’s ability to juggle humor and outlandishness with tenderness reveals a true agility by never succumbing to oversentimentality nor silliness. Despite centering around an octopus lover, this work focuses on the very human acts of forget and of fantasy. The question “It can’t be so crazy for/ an octopus to want that, too, / can it?” feels like the crux of the poem and creates a vital moment of extending the poem outside of its immediate situation — the rhetorical question works masterfully to raise the stakes of the poem. I find the muted ending of the poem to be moving and immaculately tied into the themes of water and the ocean.

The form and imagination in “Alternative Reality” by Ugochukwu Damian Okpara combine to create a poem we found moving and memorable. By imagining a different reality, the speaker has a venue to explore ideas of identity and place. The poem creates a type of realistic surrealism, despite that seeming oxymoronic, through its use of the hypothetical to explore both the known and the unknown. The anaphora of “suppose” is emotionally effective in reminding the reader that the speaker is imagining an alternative reality, while the repetition of the word “name” emphasizes the importance of a name culturally and the weight that it carries. I love how the poem moves all the way from evoking god to the realism of an uber app and its success in handling such a wide scope.

Caroline White is a second-year poetry student. She is the winner of the Prime Number Magazine‘s Prize for Poetry, and her work has appeared in Askew Magazine. She currently serves as a Poetry Editor for The Greensboro Review.