In a world where writers operate within the confines of page and word limits, Sionnain Buckley is a visionary without regard for parameters. In her poem, “The Time-Space Synesthete Draws You a Picture of What You Can’t See” Buckley renders a world where time has a shape, where every word has weight, and where the experience of glimpsing through the speaker's vast, synesthetic scope will leave an indelible impression in your worldview.

Madeleine Bazil’s poems toe the line between tenderness and unabashed longing. Intimate, urgent, prismatic—yet unassumingly brief—every word is threaded together with the precision of fate, and every stanza is a carefully-crafted room within the palace of the speaker’s vivid memory.

The gift of Jeni Prater’s poems is their effortless ability to render the mundane a miracle, the invisible seen, and the “unconventional” a beautiful new future. As her words search for life, sifting through the complexities of biology and bureaucracy both, her readers are unwittingly captivated by the tenderness of her tireless pursuit.

Part elegy, part prayer, part epistolary masterpiece—Amy Rose Lafty’s “My Father Is a Crab Nebula” is as littered with love and grief as the galaxy is replete with stars. You won’t soon find a more intimate glimpse into the cosmic transcendence of a life lost too soon—and the mourning that comes from being left behind.