Peter Gizzi

‘I did not understand / the code that held / me to the world.’

Jenny George

‘This had happened once before, / when my life first split / into comfort and pain.’

Miriam Bird Greenberg

‘Why wasn’t I better made / to refute assimilation’s maze’

Will Harris

‘a man caught my eye as I was about to cross the road / and asked to shake my hand. You have a kind face, he said.’

Benoit Jutras

‘Our nation is a spell of nerves and gas. We say yes to monsters, to elegies etched in our palms.’ Translated by Daniel Canty.

Kim Fu

‘I see them as a needlepoint sampler, / flowing script that reads: everyone suffers.’

Benoit Jutras

Kim Kyung Ju

‘Underneath the leaves that stack my upper lip / the reindeer do not share their love.’ Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’

Renee Gladman

J.V. Foix

‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’

Leontia Flynn

‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’

Leontia Flynn

‘The opposite of simply sitting about / in your head, like an egg in eggshell.’

Tyehimba Jess

‘Let me tell you how / white hands kilned me / in the moonless middle / of night.’

Eliza Griswold

Angélica Freitas

‘amelia, the real woman, / ran away with the bearded lady’

Angélica Freitas

‘woman is basically meant / to be a residential complex / all the same / all plastered over / just in different colors’

Peter Gizzi

‘otherwise it is all otherwise I’m lost, did I say that’

Anjum Hasan

‘motorcyclists like to howl / and dogs drop bulging bags of garbage / from their mouths when they see other dogs / they want to mount’

Minal Hajratwala

‘The unicorns are a technology / we cannot yet approximate.’

Kimiko Hahn

‘The lemon shark / who returns to the same mangrove-lined shallows / every year to give birth.’

Adam Fitzgerald

‘Would you like to come with me for some / old-fashioned inconclusive combat?’

Sakutarō Hagiwara

‘What I do not have is Everything: / how is it that I won’t bear this neediness?’

Kimiko Hahn

‘nothing like an ancient corridor where a / woman is stripped of resistance.’

Kimiko Hahn

‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’

Aracelis Girmay

‘Please stay with me as I / replay the last touch.’

Ishion Hutchinson

‘The train station was a cemetery. / Drunk with spirits, another being entered.’

Lavinia Greenlaw

‘Do they dance for those creatures / whose unmade selves / come unbuttoning out of the dark?’

Sadaf Halai

‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’

Amy Gerstler

‘I must remember god is not my private / secretary.’

Sadaf Halai

‘It made the sound of / a small balloon dropping.’

Selima Hill

‘Black against the sky the giant mothers / are whispering together in the moonlight’

Hiromi Itō

‘Who connects with the next woman / With tens and hundreds and thousands of women.’

Juan Felipe Herrera

Yasmeen Hameed

‘Tell me, what is this cry of pain in the air?’

Hasina Gul