Alexis Rhone Fancher: Hermanas
You’re the same, you two, J, my lover, said. Of course you feel an affinity. I stared at the Frida Kahlo self-portrait in his hands. Frida’s soulful sweetness stared back. You … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: Dark Time
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
Ed Simon: Introducing The Pittsburgh Review of Books
A call for submissions
Baron Wormser: The Fury
Politics requires suppleness, the ability to compromise, to fit means to ends, to temper principles for the sake of reaching agreement, to turn burning moral issues into administrative questions, to convert moral enemies into amiable opponents, the duel into a debate.
Angele Ellis: Memory’s Self-portrait
Seeing Things by Marjorie Maddox. Wildhouse Poetry (an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing), 2025.
Baron Wormser: Dissident
Of necessity, the path of the dissident, since it depends on the exactions of conscience, is a solitary one. I think of Henry David Thoreau’s night in a jail … Continue reading
Rachel Hadas: Three Poems
Wait. Something I had never thought to see
again clanks forward from obscurity-
that creaky train I’d once been riding on,
a journey slow and grim.
William D. Hartung: The New Age Militarists
According to this view, the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
Rachel Hadas: Why Trump’s rage defies historical and literary comparisons
As he has gained fame and power, Trump’s contemptuous rage at his opponents and his appetite for vengeance appear to have sharpened.
Bob Dylan: Nobel Lecture
When awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan gave no comment for two weeks, ignored the Academy’s calls, didn’t attend the ceremony, and collected the award in a hoodie four months later. But Dylan later sent them a rambling, 27-minute ode to literature.
Mike Schneider: Stirring Up the “Great Folk Scare”
There’s nothing easy-going about the folk songs of the Greenwich Village revival, not the ones Dylan sang — a man-killing woman, catastrophic floods, a man driven insane by love — songs that taught him there’s nothing new on Earth.
Michael T. Young: The Need to Believe | The Poetry of Lisel Mueller
This is the power we need in a post-truth world, where political forces claim the right to manipulate our perceptions through distortions of language.
Angele Ellis: The life and legacy of Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)
Refaat Alareer stands in a field in Gaza, holding a container of freshly picked strawberries. What evokes the earth’s sweetness more fully than a ripe berry? The expression on his face—scholarly, bespectacled—is gentle and tender.
John Zheng: Poetry as Enchantment by Dana Gioia
“If poetry is the most ancient and primal art, if it is a universal human activity, if it uses the rhythmic power of music to speak to us in deep and mysterious ways, if the art is a sort of secular magic that heightens the sense of our own humanity, then why is poetry so unpopular?”
