Cincinnati Review

“Those Statues of Old,” contextualized by the 1897 massacre and looting of Benin City by the British, is a simultaneously expansive and intimate meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of poems to speak to the dead

In Alina Stefanescu’s “Why One Cloud Is Kin to Not Liking,” a deft observation of a cloud’s “power of chilling” follows a list of reasons why the speaker’s in-laws don’t like her.

“Sam Less” by Jonathan Cardew demonstrates the limits of language by subverting the need to find the correct words in order to form self-knowledge.

In just nine lines, some only one or two words in length, Sheikh uses the salwar kameez as a guiding image to unravel a reflection on girlhood.

A take on “Dream Song 31,” Aldana’s poem follows in a long line of erasure poems critiquing a found text—but unlike traditional erasures, “31” reorders elements of the original text.