“I am tired of women who are sad. I am tired of / Men who are tired.” The end of April is a good time to be finished with feeling sad and tired. It’s springtime; the earth is singing; it’s still National Poetry Month. I’ve never seen the Thames, but I know it mythically, as all rivers are known.

you grab the end of your girlfriend’s scarf and quickly sniff it
when she’s not at the table
I pick off the strands of hair caught on her coat when we go out

i will go to sleep once
my hair is wrapped
with the pterodactyl clips

The fiery rays of the summer sun
are scorching the earth.
The withered prairie, in its slow death throes,

Undisputedly, the years have been at once kind and brutal to Ocean Vuong. I say kind in the sense that, from a career perspective, Vuong has ascended to the peak of literary prominence at a pace and to heights few contemporary poets can match. Along the way up, he’s accrued a faithful audience, struck late-night talk-show stardom, and garnered prestigious awards, a T.S. Eliot Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, among countless others. But I also say brutal, in that violence and loss continue to plague Vuong’s life: he’s had to contend with the harsh realities of growing up in poverty, as an immigrant and former refugee from Vietnam, and as a bookish queer boy navigating through a largely unsympathetic society.

I am that boy sneaking around corners of the old Brewery.

In the first picture my father's hands ain't holding nothing

The statue's red lips
drip with the spit
of abandoned wives.

You talk of time and how its crooked ways will make us old as time. of daily devotions. of the goodness in good friday.

You asked me what I knew about thermals—
heat’s tendency to rise, cool, fall again and so
I showed you how to recognize the circle

transcendentally stoned song off a balcony
hand through his hair as it falls on the floor
panting on my back said “holes aren’t longing

Fastened to keys and thieves in its fate
Just as life is fastened to the bright and degenerate,
To forgiveness or silence.

This past week, many of my waking thoughts have strayed towards Ukraine, as I am sure is true for many. Between fear of nuclear threats from Russia, the danger of totalitarianism in Europe, and moving portraits of everyday citizens taking up arms, international consciousness is riveted to this disturbing development.

What does it mean to occupy an “Alaska of the mind”? Is it possible to write into and against the world of your own poems? In her debut poetry collection, This Alaska, Carlie Hoffman maps a vast, sparsely populated, and glacial terrain, choosing this landscape as the place of her reckoning with her childhood, grief, suffering, love, and hope. A poet, translator, and educator, Hoffman’s honors include a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, among others. In conversation with Nina Reljić, a Columbia MFA student, Hoffman discusses her writing methodology and how some answers exist at the bottom of an endless well.

This initial version of Marie Howe’s “The Gate” appeared in our 1996 winter issue—coincidentally the year and season of my own birth. For a number of reasons, I’ve been obsessed for a while with the concept of a gate: the gates that we keep, the ones we pass or don’t pass at TSA, the rooms we are kept out of and are forced to break into or recreate outside toxic systems of power. Here, Howe deals directly with maybe the most important door we all must someday pass through.

I’m situated now inside the evening
I carry two cold beers in my plastic grocery sac
It feels amniotic and sane

The blade, huge,
on which my daily
panic of a face

I’ve never gone swimming in a river (I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a river considered clean enough to swim in), but I’ll never forget William Blake’s words in “The Chimney Sweeper“: “And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.” I doubt that, in Blake’s lifetime, anyone would have much fancied the Thames as a purificatory bath; but that does not stop the imagination from portraying it thus. I don’t think I can avoid rivers in my poetry, either, whether I’ll ever swim in one or not.

On the stand that collapsed
long before my arrival, I halt
and look to the autumn sun—

Marie Howe’s poem “Late Morning” was published in the Winter 1996-7 issue of Columbia Journal. Spare and uncompromising, the poem meditates upon the moments in which grief finds us, upon the mundane details that harbor such horror: “I remember … crumbs and dishes still / on the table, and a small glass bottle of milk and an open jar of raspberry jam”.