On Verse
Conjuring Green with Natalie Diaz
This is the drill when it comes to poetry workshops: print out enough copies of your poem, read it to a room full of strangers, and engage in a sort…
Ode to mentality; or, Poetry needs weird subjectivity
I’m working for free. I’m not a cynic. —Alan Dugan …one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. —Marianne Moore An Image for Readers “Does this poet…
Infertility Rites: Monica Youn’s Blackacre
In her previous life as an attorney, Monica Youn represented Mr. Potato Head and made the rounds explaining Citizens United to ordinary citizens. With her turn as mother, the former…
Or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying: Collaborative Writing, Motherhood, and the Atom Bomb
In Inger Christensen’s long poem Alphabet, first published in Danish in 1981, the poet cooks potatoes. And atom bombs exist. While she stands in the kitchen peeling potatoes under the…
From the Editors: the Motherhood Issue
We’re trying to think back to the origins of A. Bradstreet: We remember that I was working in the Poetry Room at Harvard. That I came by to drop off…
Imagining Mothering (excerpt)
1. A friend says motherhood is like living with your heart outside your body. This is more like science fiction than it seems at first, I decide days after we’ve…
blk/wooomen revolution: Orbiting Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker and Elizabeth Alexander
When PBS begins airing the documentary BaddDDD [i] about the life of Sonia Sanchez, it is the middle of the semester, my sixth wedding anniversary is just coming or going, my…
“The Lyric Self is the Political Weapon”: Solmaz Sharif’s Look
Part of being an exile, a nomad, is that the most significant moments in your life pass by in places where you have no memories and no past. —Shirin Ebadi…
Rejection is Seductive: Elisa Gabbert’s L’Heure Bleue
Elisa Gabbert’s unique gift is the ability to resurrect the cliché, which she does by reformulating common sense as a question and then attaching the well-worn sentiment to the unworn…