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The Bradford Pear Easter, and despite our best intentions, our genetic ingenuity, the Bradford pears are blooming everywhere we did not intend them— beside the mall, in the ditches, a ruffled swath of white beside the railroad tracks. Pretty as first communion, my mother would have said, a lilt in her voice betraying her lack of conviction. A plague of blossoms, to be sure, a...

   The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures By Sean Hill Milkweed Editions | 2026 | 232 pages met Sean Hill’s graduate committee chair, Barbara McCaskill, after her reading in Massachusetts. She was sharing from her unpublished essay about Brister Cumings, a formally enslaved Black man from Concord who fought in the Revolutionary War. It is s...

In New York, the nexus of accident and fate is an ever-present reality, tightly woven like the grid of the streets. Author’s Note: In 1980, Edward Fausty and I embarked on a year-long documentation of New York City’s Lower East Side in a unique collaboration in which we shared a 4×5 view camera. The images in this photo essay were taken from that project. 1980 was a pivotal...

Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series    Weather Psalm That button on the continent’s dashboard? Push it. Let the sky fill up with parachutes, let the sky set us down    in some magic future where the wind sends light through our wiring. See that sign on the sun    through your telescope? Those hieroglyphics    spell “High Voltage.” So the...

In the Backcountry of Grand Teton National Park, Wearing a Trucker Hat that Says, Jackson Hole Queer, I Remember Wyoming’s the state where Brokeback Mountain took place. Each pastoral poem I write gets hit in the head with a tire iron. The steel-toed sunset kicks me in the eye, clouds purpling like a bruise on the bloodstained horizon. These mountains stick out of dirt like c...