Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.
The rupture
has come
to the city
so I bought it
tickets to view
its constituent
limbs, the bodies
that host them.
Pain is just
another word
for order.
Order is not
an assembly
between edges
of a city. It is
physical pain
inside its
insides as
the bodily
show begins
to culture.
Bret Shepard directs the creative writing program at the University of Idaho and co-edits Dikembe Press. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review and Copper Nickel.
We rely on readers to keep our pages free and open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination: become a supporting reader today.
The best writing on ideas, politics, and culture delivered straight to your inbox.
An interview with S’bu Zikode, leader of South Africa's shack dwellers’ movement, thirty years after apartheid’s end.
For Robert Jay Lifton, treating veterans’ trauma was an antiwar tool. How did PTSD, the diagnosis he helped create, come to accommodate state violence?
“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster—with work by Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky, Solmaz Sharif, Juan Felipe Herrera, and much more.
Newsletter subscribers get our latest essays, reading lists, and exclusive editorial content (plus 10% off our entire store).
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.
