Vox Populi

A Public Sphere for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 15,000 daily subscribers. Over 7,000 archived posts.

Beverly Gologorsky: Hunger in America

How It Feels to Be Hungry

March 16, 2023 · 3 Comments

Rev. William J. Barber II, Karen Dolan: This is an Election Americans Cannot Afford to Lose

The stakes for America’s poor and low-income families are huge this election.

November 6, 2022 · Leave a comment

Jane Taylor: Poverty

O then, let the wealthy and gay
But see such a hovel as this,
That in a poor cottage of clay
They may know what true misery is.

January 7, 2022 · Leave a comment

Thomas W. Fraser: Overcoming Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘three evils of society’

We can still bend the arc of history through a ceaseless pursuit of beloved community.

September 22, 2021 · 2 Comments

Jefferson Carter: Cat & Transient

I swore I’d stop writing about liberal guilt
& about cats too, but I must confess
last night, I groomed our little black cat
with my tongue

September 14, 2021 · 1 Comment

Video: J.D. Vance| America’s Forgotten Working Class

J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing schools, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes violence.

August 7, 2021 · 5 Comments

Video: Hurray For the Riff Raff | PA’LANTE

Winner of the 2019 Jury Award at SXSW, Director Kristian Mercado Figueroa’s music video PA’LANTE performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff  takes us inside the Puerto Rican experience of life post Hurricane Maria and the pressures facing an estranged family attempting to reconnect amid the wreckage.

July 24, 2021 · Leave a comment

Ellen McGrath Smith: Good Friday, Fernhill Dump

Standing, a girl-boy, on the junked car in the dump,
some other kids across the dump standing on their cars

April 2, 2021 · 1 Comment

Rajan Menon: A Covid-19 Hell on Earth

How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable: A Field Guide to Our Threadbare Social Safety Net.

February 26, 2021 · Leave a comment

Arlene Weiner: Nobody’s coming to save the children

Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor.

February 23, 2021 · 4 Comments

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers: The Decade of Transformation is Here

Remaking the Economy for the People

March 31, 2020 · 1 Comment

Hama Tuma: Just a Nobody

The dead man was no one, just a man in tattered clothes, no shoes, just a coin in his pocket, no id cards, no bus ticket. He was a nobody, … Continue reading

May 2, 2019 · 2 Comments

Adrie Kusserow: Bus Station, Kampala, Uganda

For Willem, age 3 . We are lost. . Holding you tight, the drunks pawing me . as I weave through the stalls sticky with beer and urine . looking … Continue reading

March 13, 2019 · Leave a comment

Deborah Bogen: Rue Saint-Séverin

Dirt and hunger. Foreheads burnt, no, branded by heat. Backpacks. Paper cups. Bundles that are everything we own. Beneath the gargoyles, our babies sleep. We used to have houses. Once … Continue reading

November 17, 2015 · 3 Comments

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