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July/August 2024 + November 2026 · Checked 2026-11-10

Featured Poetry

Complete official contents for two issues: poems, original-language texts, translations and commentary. Five selected close readings; a bibliography is not an analysis of every work.

2 issues · 122 bibliography entries · 5 close readings

Selected close readings

01 · Poetry

Cinema ↗

Jessica Abughattas

July/August 2024

Proesy research interpretation

A first-person account of leaving a relationship moves through family dialogue and domestic space. The tree and cinema metaphors extend the speaker’s thinking; the ending shifts to laughter heard from another apartment. Enjambment delays completion of sentences.

Reading / revision question

Where does a concrete setting complicate your speaker’s stated feeling? Read your line endings without the next line: what expectation do they create?

02 · Poetry

Mother Emanuel Nine: Their Influence Was Wide ↗

Cheryl Clarke

July/August 2024

Proesy research interpretation

A memorial accumulates roles, names and ages. Repeated church names, indentation and the return to naming make public remembrance a formal action, rather than a private lyric narrative.

Reading / revision question

What does repetition do beyond emphasis in your poem? If you use a list, how does its ordering change the moral or emotional pressure?

03 · Poetry

Mount Grace Priory ↗

G.C. Waldrep

July/August 2024

Proesy research interpretation

The poem questions the adequacy of language rather than recounting a domestic event. Walking toward and away from a place, and green returning as an idea of green, make perception itself the action. The ending personifies the two languages as observers. This is a counterexample to treating narrative confession as the issue’s single mode.

Metalinguistic reflection · Repetition · Approach / withdrawal

Reading / revision question

Underline where your poem describes a thing and where it describes the act of perceiving it. Does that shift create pressure or merely abstraction?

04 · Poetry

Inaudible Lasso ↗

Meg Day

November 2026

Proesy research interpretation

Alternating indented lines carry sentences across line breaks. Horses, weather, sorrow and drought recur through a dreamlike image system, interrupted by a specific memory of a roadside aluminum ring. That ordinary exchange provides a different scale from the poem’s expansive climate and divine imagery.

Alternating indentation · Sustained equine imagery · Dream / remembered scene

Reading / revision question

Where does your extended image system meet an ordinary action? Try adding one remembered exchange without explaining what it symbolizes.

05 · Poetry

God Is Not a Father ↗

Jaswinder Bolina

November 2026

Proesy research interpretation

Repeated asking and telling organize a parent–child conversation in a car. Snacks, traffic, weather and wipers keep theological and scientific explanations inside a lived scene. The ending moves from enormous origins to an uncertain estimate of minutes until home, letting ordinary parental care qualify the speaker’s authority.

Parent / child dialogue · Anaphora · Scale shift in ending

Reading / revision question

Does your ending change the scale of the argument? Replace your last general statement with an action or answer that reveals what the speaker can and cannot know.

What the sample supports

These two poems use markedly different engines: domestic first-person narrative and collective memorial catalog. Their coexistence is evidence against reducing this issue to one preferred voice.

Line placement carries meaning in both works, but these examples do not establish a submission requirement.

November 2026 includes a separately labeled Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize feature. Its Robert Pinsky poems are a prize-related feature, not evidence that each poem won a contest. The feature must not be mixed into an ordinary-submission sample as if selection were identical.

Across these selected readings, sustained imagery and conversational argument coexist. This comparison documents difference, not a preferred recipe.

Limits & counterexamples

Two nonconsecutive issues and five purposive readings cannot establish current editorial preferences or acceptance probabilities. Original-language and translated entries are counted separately as the contents list them, not as independent creative works. The Ruth Lilly feature is documented; poem-level award wins and a representative winner/non-winner comparison are not established.

Your reading worksheet

  1. Choose two works in the same form and different issues. Record title, author, issue and source.
  2. Poetry: compare line endings, sound, syntax, image recurrence, address and the final turn. Prose: compare point of view, distance, tense, scene, reflection, structure and ending.
  3. Write one observation about each text, with a passage location. Find a counterexample before naming a tendency.
  4. Separate ordinary contents from prize-related features. An author’s career award is not a prize awarded to every featured poem.
  5. Choose one revision question for your own work without copying the source’s voice. Check current official rules and AI policy before submission.
Proesy Magazine ↗

Verified issue bibliography

July/August 2024 · 72 entries ↗November 2026 · 50 entries ↗

122 of 122 entries · Award context is recorded separately