The Adroit Journal

When I was a child, my mother and I used to get into screaming fights over small things I said that weren’t meant to hurt her, but did. “That’s not what I meant,” I would sob. “It doesn’t matter what you meant, that’s what I heard,” she’d say. My mother was the last person I…

Julie Buntin’s new novel, Famous Men, is recently out from Random House. She’s also the author of Marlena (Holt, 2017)—a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize—and the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty-five writers and artists. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and…

Poetry is an act of witness. An act of witnessing the world, language, the self, or in my book, A Ghost Has No Fantasies, history. Once the book was published in January, I found myself witnessing the effect it has on myself and others and asking this question: how do we bear witness to atrocity,…

In the forty-eight pages that comprise her slim and tender poetry collection Red Seed: Poems for Luno, Tutunakú poet and translator Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez honors the women that came before her, the creation myths that inform her people’s sense of themselves and of the world, and the creativity of the Tutunakú language. One leaves…

D.S. Waldman is the author of the poetry collection Atria (Liveright/WW Norton, 2026). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and many other publications. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and recipient of Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, Waldman lives and…