The Blog

THE IOWA REVIEW celebrates National Poetry Month 2019

Izzy Casey

There is a difference between abandoning our artistic obsessions and tackling them from unexpected angles. As poets, it’s crucial to resist “poetic stuckness” and reconfigure our understanding of “what we know.” The Iowa Review is thrilled to celebrate another poetry month with our annual online feature. For the month of April, TIR will publish a poem a day online by poets who do not neglect their impulses, but embrace them through a process of redefinition.

Here's the list of this year's poets

Leg Room // Instructions for Being an Inspiration

Hedgie Choi

Instructions for Being an Inspiration

After the pig ran away
my grandpa fixed the pigpen
and when I asked
why he said oink oink and got
cancer and threw things
at my grandma for two years
and died. And then the pig

Don't Ask Me Where the Dream Went because It Never Spoke to Me Again

Cynthia Cruz

You are a car, you are
a hospital,

warm lights
at the edge

of a deathless
highway.

You are a truck
stop, a star.

Allison Cobb's GREEN-WOOD

Peter Myers

A recent study found that the global climate disruption known as the Little Ice Age—an early modern dip in temperatures that famously caused the River Thames to freeze over—had its roots in European colonialism. The genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas left vast tracts of agricultural land untended; subsequent reforestation pulled enough CO₂ out of the atmosphere to cause a global decline in temperatures.

Interview with Franny Choi

Katherine Gibbel

Franny Choi is a poet, performer, editor, and playwright. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, senior news editor for Hyphen, cohost of the Poetry Foundation podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2018. A current Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, she is currently based near Detroit, Michigan.