By Elijah Sparkman   Peter Markus lives downriver. I live in Hamtramck, MI. Sometimes we meet in the middle and play tennis in southwest Detroit. We talk. A lot of what we talk about are the t…

Left alone, an empty jug will replenish, so it has been written; mirrors will cast flashes from one’s past; an apple will bleed; an acorn will swell into a giant. How dependable is the behav…

Happy birthday, Wallace Stevens!

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Heller Levinson! Celebrate by reading these five Levinson poems, which we published in 2024! The poems were subsequently featured in Levinson’s Crossfall…

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

1. Looming  the dark riddle repeated harbor sky an episode    gradual but less than as if scooped from blue    neither recollected nor answered     as if a laminate hovers over the dark ridd…

Happy birthday, William Carlos Williams, whose radical proposition placed imagination at the heart of reality: a way of seeing the world with greater intensity. For Williams, poetry describes the w…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Michael Lee Rattigan! Celebrate by reading these Rattigan poems we published in 2026!   Underland “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.…

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

Happy birthday, Richard Wright! Here are some quotes from the writer:   “All literature is protest.”   “The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.”   “I would …

Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Grace Campbell! Read this Campbell nonfiction we published in 2019!   Windows lap up the rust belt, entire counties at a time. Gram’s in the seat next to …

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Robert Lopez! Celebrate by reading Lopez’s “However Many Sayings to Live and Die By,” which we published in 2020, and which was subsequently selected for…

Perfume In the expensive gym, the girls are uncertain. They parade their bodies, young or old or approaching some pure azimuth of animé hyperbole. Or they are aspirational, regretful, immatu…

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

Meditation on Roget’s Paradox of Choice You have your preferences proclivities inclinations predispositions tendencies favorites You make your    choices exercising your    free will        …

Happy birthday, Jorge Luis Borges! Here are some quotes from the writer:   “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”   “I have always imagined that Paradise wi…

By Richard Hamilton   Phenomenology happens along a continuum at the crossroad between chaos and the cosmos. By one account, it is characterized as “the structure of various types of experienc…

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

Happy birthday, John Hawkes! Here are some quotes from the author:   “‘Choice means variable, variable means discontinuity, discontinuity destroys hierarchy.'”   “I bega…

We are pleased to nominate the following fictions for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2027 (Black Lawrence Press):   Martine Bellen’s “The Doctrine of Notions” Noy Ho…

I am trying to keep myself busy while the world is on hold. And so I do what I have always done: I chop. I cannot go to the store, I cannot go to the beach, I must stay inside, but I can cho…

I wake up every night unable to open my mouth. I’m grinding my teeth in my sleep. My dentist tells me it’s either fear or stress. Figure out which one, or both, and you’ll figure out where t…

By Robert Lopez   What Not to Do, How Not to Live Don’t get born, don’t be a person, don’t get born as a person to a family of people. Don’t be black or white or brown and don’t be short or fa…

(with appreciation for Italo Calvino)   The City of Serena In the beautiful city of Serena, every old woman wears a mask. The body may yet appear lithe in slacks, in silks, in exquisitely calc…

Happy birthday, Herman Melville! Here are some quotes from his writing:   “It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.”   “Truth is ever in…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Tim Horvath! Celebrate by reading this Horvath fiction (with music by Rafaele Andrade), which we published in 2020, and which was subsequently selected for inc…

Philoxenia Darling strangers populate my life, ones I love dearly, more than life herself—a prophet and a blind woman, a small terrier mix, possibly Jack Russell, part Maltese or bichon fris…

Happy birthday, William H. Gass! Here are some quotes from his books, interviews, etc. Speaking of interviews, read my career-spanning interview with Gass!   “Naturally the artist is an enemy …

Happy birthday, John Ashbery! Here are some quotes from his writing:   “I too often feel like a person I know nothing about.”   “I don’t think very much about myse…

Happy birthday, Gerard Manley Hopkins! Here are some quotes from his writing:   “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.”   “What I do is me: for that I …

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Deema K. Shehabi! Celebrate by reading these Shehabi poems we published in 2022!   Pantoum (for Fuad) Summer at the solstice unburies its bloodlust before…

Happy birthday, Aldous Huxley! Here are some quotes from the writer:   “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”   “Most human beings have an almos…

Happy birthday, Elias Canetti! Here are some quotes from the writer:   “Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past, it is too rich, you’re…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Elaine Equi! Celebrate by reading the five Equi poems below, which we published in 2025! And then go read the Equi poems we published in 2019 (and go wa…

Happy birthday, Frantz Fanon! Here are some quotes from the philosopher, revolutionary, and writer.   “My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” &n…

Happy birthday, Jacques Derrida! Here are some quotes from the philosopher:   “I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.”   “No difference without alterity, no alterity without sin…

Happy birthday, Walter Benjamin! Here are some quotes from the author’s texts:   “The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dyin…

Happy birthday, Henry David Thoreau! Here are some quotes from his writing:   “You must get your living by loving.”   “Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in n…

Happy birthday, Marcel Proust! Here are some quotes from the writer:   “Love is space and time measured by the heart.”   “In love, happiness is an abnormal state.…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Jeffery Renard Allen! Celebrate by reading Allen’s “Four Poems,” which we published in 2025! Then go read “Reading the Blind and Blacking the Beyon…

By Barb Dwyer   Today, large sectors of the United States will celebrate two hundred and fifty years since the Declaration of Independence. There will be fireworks, drones choreographing const…

Happy birthday, Franz Kafka! Here are some quotes from the writer:   “I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”   “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amou…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Kenning JP García! Celebrate by reading García’s “Grace Notes,” which we published in Puerto Rican Writers Folio: A Hauntology in 2022! &nbsp…