ANMLY #40 :: Poetry

It is late spring 2025, and I am sure you, reader, wherever you are, share my anxieties about the social, political, and ecological problems wracking this planet we share. Poetry can have many uses as it exists in the world, but I find it often serves as a vehicle for both escaping the many sufferings of reality, and understanding them: whether the perfect clarifying image that makes an entire emotional complexity finally align, or the right voice to share in rage and solace (and the best kind of poem does these modes, and more, at once). In getting to know the poems in this issue, I have found them remarkable boons to my need to both escape and understand. What follows is an introduction, a brief sampling, of the types of poetic works you will find in this issue of ANMLY:

In his poem “Crescent’s Quest,” Agboola, Tariq A, Swan II balances personal faith with ecological devastation, asking, “Lord, if this be another Genesis, / From whose tongue will the prophecy drift?” while .Chisaraokwu. gives us two poems of differing line lengths, but equal in their power with regard to faith, family, gender, and survival. At times bleakly grey and beautifully colorful, Anton Lushankin’s “(G)loss” navigates a relationship against a backdrop of literature, political philosophy, distance, and time. How can I not be struck by Ron Riekki’s use of repetition to combat institutional trauma and violence? 

Bunny Morris’s “Wound Citation” is a wild sequence: intelligent, funny, and emotionally ruinous, this poem is like being thrown into a movie of rapidly changing scenes, where lines like “life is a boring sonnet full of no no no. / Kind of Catholic, my hole” is right at home next to “I am made of genetic guilt. I don’t believe I am still alive.” Noemi Vebveric Levovnik’s two poems are also a delicate balance, at once musical feminist verse proclaiming the gospel of pussy, and complicated navigation of body autonomy and desire practices. 

In “Lambrini Socialist,” Baz’s speaker is tongue-in-cheek bourgeoisie decadence, half-played for laughs and half a riveting tale of camouflage, a struggle for continued existence, “I eat baroque, and am a slut / for the falbed yellow label. Theft’s a hobby / not a habit. Fuck me on a leopard skin / that never had to die.” Rob Macaisa Colgate’s moving, echoing prose stanzas truly resonate that they are, “the sole container of everything I love.” 

Abdulbasit Oluwanishola’s two poems are heartfelt and harrowing encounters, balancing anti-Muslim violence in the wake of the Palestinian genocide with a ghazal for a friend. MK Kuol writes of violence in South Sudan, a haunted, tragic piece which is a prayer, “to atem, my mother’s god, to appease Kalashnikov’s rage / & morph bullets into smooth breezes upon kissing my skin.” 

Angela Sim’s short poem “개꿈” (“Dog Dream”) is itself a dreamlike wandering into family and language, its images as ephemeral as the smoke it carries; Isobel Burke’s “Home Equity Loan” navigates a picking up the pieces of a broken home, and attempting to reforge a new hope, a new life. Navigating grief and music, parenthood and time, Svetlana Litvinchuk’s “If Music is the Sound Between” is a heart-stopping sequence poem that sings, “You cannot place the untangled knot in the same drawer / with the rest // & shut it and simply walk away.” 

Pamela K Santos’s four poems reference everything from Phillipine film to contemporary anime, culminating in a series of lyrical poems about gender politics, land, and home  with a keen, ironic, thoughtful eye; samodH Porawagamage’s two poems declare resistance to the Palestinian genocide alongside thinking about race, language, and nationalism with both humor and incisive clarity. In two poems, one grounded, the other lyrical, Thaer Husein adds his own Palestinian voice against “those who storm-chase crimes against humanity.” 

Dylan Mcnulty-Holmes’s “Marlow Moss Was a Babe and So Am I” is one of the most formally rigorous poems in this edition, a contrapuntal ekphrasis of the titular artist’s, “Composition in Yellow, Black, and White (1949), with blocks of color injected into the poem to match the painting itself. JeFF Stumpo’s “Nuestra Señora de Concept Album” is just as inventive, a poem-play for Janelle Monáe that struts, “We pierced ourselves to become holy.” Mai-Linh Hong offers her own triple-contrapuntal and mirrored prose poem in two complex, lyrical investigations of movement, memory, and loss. And how can I not be both wounded and seen by Troels Heiredal’s poem, “Mirror,” a formal and linguistic investigation of social otherness and alienation? 

I am grateful and humbled by the diverse range of voices, viewpoints, and life experiences included in our poetry section, both in the submitted poems and those enclosed here in the issue. You will find in this issue poets writing from across the globe: Nigeria, Germany, Ukraine, Canada, South Sudan, Taiwan, and more; I am especially honored to be able to share work from poets living, writing, and surviving in active war zones. The language the poets in this issue offer is both gratifying and challenging, evocative and questioning, familiar and strange. Above all, I hope these poems help you remember and reflect on what it means to be alive–that these poems are a reminder of the necessity of kindness and care, that these poems make our little cruelties all the more slightly impossible, unrendered. 

Sincerely, 

—James O’Leary, Assistant Poetry Editor
May 2025

Featured in this folio:

ANMLY #40 Poetry Team

Sarah Clark, Poetry Editor
Ebony E. Chinn, Editor-at-Large
Ching In-Chen, Editor-at-Large
Allison Thung, Assistant Poetry Editor
Sonia Beauchamp, Assistant Poetry Editor
Willow James Claire, Assistant Poetry Editor
leena aboutaleb, Poetry & Nonfiction Reader
Iyanuoluwa Adenle, Poetry Reader
Stephanie Kaylor, Poetry & Nonfiction Reader
Ashish Kumar Singh, Poetry Reader
tripp j crouse, Poetry Reader
J.L. Moultrie, Poetry Reader, Nonfiction Reader, & Assistant Fiction Editor
Aylli Cortez, Poetry Reader
I Echo, Poetry Reader
Eros Livieratos, Poetry Reader