Everyone looked up On Michigan AvenueOn balconies and rooftopsBy the AdlerWe all looked up. We all felt giddyGrateful even for this momentPeople waved their solar glasses at each otherAs if we […]

In the humid loam of a Jurassic-era feeling Southern United States, poet Hannah V. Warrendebuts her collection, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (Sundress Publications, January2024). Betraying the old adage, you […]

Interview conducted by Binx River Perino. Chicago-based writer Diego Báez is an educator at the City Colleges and a fellow at CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator […]

If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]

The 2023 Chicago Review of Books Awards shortlist includes literary works ranging in subject matter from queer motherhood to belonging and migration, Chicago’s Black cowboy culture, and women’s overlooked heroism during World War II.

Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) thinks the little free libraries along many Chicago sidewalks are bad—very bad. They are “unregulated”! And they’re “popular”! And many of them are planted in city soil! (Collective […]

Near the end of Saturday at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest, an 80-year-old Italian painter from the North Shore told me she’s going to have a huge party if […]

When the world is literally on fire, who can think about writing? The present writer was reminded of Chicago author Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 Electric Literature essay on the topic (“The […]

June Sawyers wrote this poem—as a way to record her experience—on a walk over to Soldier Field this weekend during the Taylor Swift The Eras Tour. Taylor knowsyour secretsyour vulnerabilitiesyour […]

Nobody knows anything about Homer except what’s in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, even there, it gets dicey, as James I. Porter details in his challenging and provocative Homer: […]

Puddin’ is a slim volume, small enough to tuck in a back pocket or a small purse. That size may suggest a good way to read this “memoir in prose poems” […]

In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs. She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth—at broken hearts and […]