Paperbag Journal

03/22/2025

I’m tuckered out after a long riverside walk!! So much to see and so much to sniff out here!

01/26/2024

Distinct from attention or awareness, surveillance is often most what it does while seeming not to. This is akin to the help of the guest uninvited, like the gift you must accept, the apology unspoken, instilled unspoken in the architectures, arranging the arrogance of architectures—and as Ashbery puts it, “There is no end to his / Dislike, the accurate one.” Well, Hilliard’s precision is complete lyric hell-raising, and their poems are love songs you must rid yourself of your own tyrants to hear. They speak both truth and sense where extractive power can’t so easily peer in and name the spirit any other than each utterance the spirit’s spoken. They praise—and move to the measure of—not only the self but the myriads of, and just like that, there can be no intruder, no hurtmonger, no miscreant, no bodies denied beauty again.

Dip from your day for a moment or so and get emboldened with more from Issue No. 14!

10/25/2023

Inside the lines, or between the lines; through the fissure, fallen or rooted? And though a reader may, in Fuad’s Hyposubject poems, find a twinge of crack-up at the corners, the breath and breadth of them amount to declamation cleared of declamation, of crescendo. They are a revelation without the rapture, a record of labor as play against both mindless forces of destruction and prosperity—here then, of significant comfort, a poetry that would swerve from doom and spare us the salvation.

Step back and tune in to more from Issue No. 14 through the link in the bio!

09/01/2023

Amid moods of hustler and bureaucrat, occur poems of great connectedness. But not all connections coexist; not all linkage leads to open lines, and McFadzean’s verse, formalist at heart, weaves its tensions and its intimacies according to that understanding. Endearingly, though, there’s faint expectation of agreement—because this is a poetry that knows you do what you can and sometimes cutting loose is all you can manage.

Head on over to the bio for more from Issue No. 14!

08/04/2023

Rejoining our pages for Issue No. 14, Chelko—with earlier work in No. 5—reminds us that a craftwork of continuity can be the very style itself, no trifle—a bearing, a way forward and out and back in, returned not to life as before but to living again enlivened. Chelko’s poems are city poems as big as many little things are, generous with tight edges, giving it all up with gratitude, dynamism, and just a touch of sweat for glitter.

Get exercised, get spirited—read more through the link in the bio!

06/09/2023

If the joy of finishing jolts a work of art alive, surely there’s a sharper joy in paring down, and yet a third in seeing the elaboration that each deletion turns to. Abraded, bathed in chemical, Hoffer’s text concedes to its surfaces glimpse of inscape texture, message thread under the message—the poem, haunted by the author, haunted with itself.

So follow the link in the bio to take a look—and then another—at the full piece from Issue No. 14!

04/21/2023

Must difficult art be beautiful? Quenton Baker’s series enacts humanist defacements toward a clearer historical document, and the erasures’ blackness stands counter to annihilating power’s formalized redactions, presenting instead stark figurations of a salving opacity, removing the language from its brutal denials. Indeed, the work is difficult, and it is beautiful.

Explore more in Issue No. 14 through the link in the bio!

12/21/2022

As the new year dawns, all of us at Paperbag are thrilled to deliver Issue No. 14, including a whole host of incredible poets and artists. We’re excited to continue sharing snippets of these here throughout 2023, and we encourage you to share your favorites far and wide!

Paperbag is an online literary arts journal, produced annually. Paperbag is interested in presenting larger bodies of poetry, visual art, sound, collaboration, and experiment from established and emerging writers and artists throughout the world. The editors of Paperbag are Margarita Delcheva, Petro...

10/28/2022

Pieces of a long piece, of a season behind us, and of a place perhaps fundamentally shifted. But elsewhere Andrew Weatherhead writes, “Poets, often wrong, are still the only people who get anything right”—and his open-hearted humor and his gut-punch lyricism, wed in consummate New York School style, incline one to go on listening through the ephemera, the city of. Read more from Issue No. 9 through the link in the bio.

10/14/2022

In collectivity lie empathy and determination. Symbiotic, we gather and disperse, the ripples of our murmurs reaching the microscopic and the stellar. Join us in taking another look at Dana Lynn Harper's "Diatoms," from Issue No. 10. For more, check out the links in the bio.