Written by: Ryan Krishna Mary Oliver spent many years of her life exploring the forests, lakes, and salt marshes of New England. For Oliver, animals were never simply background decoration; they were moral companions that guided the lives of the individuals they came into contact with. These animals often represent…
Tag: #poetry
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Emotional Maximalism and the Art of Deftness in Hera Lindsay Bird’s Love Poems
Written by: Charlotte Ungar In a poetry landscape often dominated by academic opacity or over-wrought lyricism, Hera Lindsay Bird’s work arrives with an emotional immediacy that will make you rethink the requirements to make a poem matter—not through formal precision or metaphorical restraint, but through the sheer force of unfiltered…
The Untitled Body Project
Written by: Sophie Wallis Buckner Winner of the 2025 Edwin Way Teale Award for Nature Writing The experience of the body as part of the self is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. Neuroscientists have recently begun to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying this sense of body ownership. This research…raises fundamental…
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Valuable Lessons About Writing Poetry I Wish I Knew Sooner
Written by: Liam Smith For someone who’s studied poetry for 3 years, it seems I can only talk about it through drawn-out idiosyncrasies. Jack Dayton, one of my co-editors at Queer Reviewed (a magazine for UConn’s queer students) recently asked me how to improve as a poet. My mind instantly…
Opening
Written by: Charlotte Ungar Co-First Place Winner of the 2025 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest Of all I forget, I remember, the almond blossom painting in your room, naked, your limbs sprawled out— eyeing those bending branches Coiling, climbing one another to end a flower. The blue between the…
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Nature Poem: Tommy Pico’s Exploration of Identity in Modern Environments
Written by: Liam Smith Despite a rigid poetic structure, Tommy Pico’s book Nature Poem uses fluid prose and strong personality to form a narrative of self-exploration. Published in 2017, the book traverses Pico’s identity as a queer NDN (not dead native) through the environments surrounding him in New York City….
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Spiritualism and Verse: The Rise of Poet-Monks in Medieval China
Written by: Ryan Krishna Exploring Thomas J. Mazanec’s Poet Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China provides us with an in-depth analysis of the changes that were beginning to take form in late medieval China. Buddhist monks, who were typically seen as separate from the literary world,…
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Poems to Read This Spring (and Beyond)
Written by: Margaret Devlin Towards the end of my first semester at college, I met with my advisor to discuss changing my major to “anything besides English.” Since I had no clue what I wanted to study in its place, I signed up for a handful of gen-eds and hoped…
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How Russell Edson’s Rejection of Self-Expression Can Help Writers Everywhere
Written by: Charlotte Ungar Poets and writers often marvel at the mystery of creative writing, with its rich possibilities to explain how a more ‘free’ human mind may operate in ways previously unknown. Understanding their wonder is sensible, as the barriers to entry for creative writing are close to none,…
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The Line Between Artificial and Human Writing
Written by: Toriana Grooms This semester, I am taking English 2614: Writing with Algorithms with Professor Kyle Booten, a course to learn basic coding skills to program computer-generated literature. Given the current fight between artificial intelligence and the art community, this course looks like a paradox. Not to mention, the…
