Diana Khoi Nguyen has selected Julia Wohlstetter’s Cannot Sonnet as the winner of the 2024 Oversound Chapbook Prize. Congratulations to Julia and thanks so much to everyone who entered! Julia Wohlstetter is the author of the…

Excerpt:   I wrote a book about pulling, what is a word when pulled from inside another word, or a sound when shaped from another sound, what is a story pulled from another one,…

Excerpt:   Women Collapse Into Better, Brighter Artists   She got inside the ruffle. How? The moment grew a small elevator. Juliana told the journalist she was a virgin. This inspired some to wonder…

TIANA REID WILL I EVER STOP SMOKING   —off-season fire hydrant—slick yellow dew— ghostdance with defiance another—set of circumstances— —cystic demons, dusty sandwiches, dying again— it’s telescopic, trilliumed passageways   8am in montreal fragmented…

ERIC EKSTRAND THE FEELING OF LIFE   I’m not sure how  the streets connect   to the houses that I know are there.   Great comedians like him are rare.   He leaves the…

LOUISE AKERS CUSP   there is little gentle  about administration:   the clanging   and un-clanging  of more portable shells   along indistinct  currents. the feeling   of the involuntary  shift from cusp to…

TIFFINIY YINGUS CHENG POEMS   1. prepossessing when i’m in front of a scoreboard or when i see green,  i’m behind my maximized brain––seeing my constructed well, customary beverly hill layers of  what i’m…

Excerpt: What you wait for is a lost child jumping over a puddle of water, or the enticing fall to explore gravity, or a mischievous attempt to deviate the winds to expose your face…

ISH KLEIN THE NEWS TODAY   Back to you, Sue. Thanks, Jon. It seems nearby future factors of time   Yes bike wheels like multipurpose. Obviously. It’s cold and soon   more cold will…

RANDALL MANN TAGGED                                                              …

CHEN POYU GLUTINOUS RICE BALLS                                                          …

MOLLY BRODAK THE MIND   Upslope mist  over alders reworks the brain   if admired too long.   Almost nothing isn’t cruel.   You,  wearing down   into earth,   the long-off waves like…

Excerpt:    Alien year I had it written down that meaning cannot pre-exist operation. And reading it again I mapped a shift in my intent to be ungovernable, how a diachronic relic cannot exist…

RUSTY MORRISON TWO POEMS     WALKWATCH (10)   When 4 am dark is narrow, I feel it before I leave the bed. I pull the narrow into my thighs, walk out of the…

GHAZAL MOSADEQ YOU SAY FISH     Translated from Persian      (An elegy for Mahgol)   Before you get to say something three more jars jumped over the wall We aren’t bound to…

OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF Boreal   Boreal was the word for what we wanted from each other—thinking it meant trees. Dream unfolds inside heavy wooden frame. Fresh red deer to the side of the service…

ANYTE OF TEGEA Five Poems      Translated by Mary Hickman     LOCUST AND CICADA   For her locust, nightingale of the tilled fields, and her cicada basking on oak trunks, little Myro has…

Excerpt: A Shelter be a flower, be a bathtub —James Schuyler  delicate blue transfer the little life I bring with light everything it passes through it passes through beautifully even styrofoam I will cling…

  2019 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Silvina López Medin    Excerpt:  There’s a direct relationship between my brother and the sea water, body he springs, he splashes. I’m beached on the seashore if I bring…

Andrew E. Colarusso BOWER   Bharmed and shamed by shiny things this bounty is a blood bolony / I think negus looks like a young king like tupac in the mouth and skin with…

Timothy Donnelly INSOMNIA   As darkness dissolves the forms of things   they appear to merge into the one   unbroken substance they have been   all along, no single component of which  …

Margaret Ross ACCOUNT   Four-inch platform pumps with sequined toe Three-inch gold stilettos with heart at the ankle Sneakers with suede detailing and camouflaged              two-inch platform Five-inch boots…

Brian Teare DOOMSTEAD DAYS   today’s gender is rain it touches everything with its little silver epistemology mottled like a brook trout with a hundred spots white as bark scars on this slim trunk…

Paul Killebrew NOTES ON “THE BISEXUAL PURGE”   (The text of “The Bisexual Purge” appears in issue five of Oversound, published in 2019.)   Throughout this work I discuss legal developments, cases, and arguments about…

Daniel Benjamin LONG POSTSCRIPT IN THREE PARTS   1.   This writing has no desire for prophecy, truth or even to track the moving oscillating space heater column or the rolling ball ink spilling…

Ella Marilla THE ADMIRAL   sweet who you are whoever who hide your little shooter always in our evergreen the rose of Walnut Street when you walk it your beat dusk damp and is…

Elsbeth Pancrazi POEM INTERRUPTED BY THE ARRIVAL OF OTHER LIFEFORMS   Significant genetic differences between the roots, leaves and branches of a tree   indicate a change during that tree’s lifetime   This type…

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado TI-83             I came to life in Physics           101, played to Middle and Important           Places,      …

Kate Colby THREE POEMS   NATURAL HISTORY   Summer seems longer than a field yields   saw-toothed chicory-cut color. Vetch.   Define your time in flower hours:   thick weeds breed these   mouths…

Dan Chelotti PAWTUCKET   Two lovers encased in a coaster. One has a bird in the hand. The other lover looks at the bird. There is a tree. Sheep. This will not end well.…

Graham Foust NIGHTINGALELESSNESS   Lack of nostalgia / felt as nostalgia— once just a taste, that’s now the daily mouth, and mirrors are older than bread. Near to a thought that’s not yet cooled…

Magdalena Zurawski IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT   I was sympathetic to language but often it shrugged me and kept other lovers. I crawled through the commas of Romanticism and rejected the rhythms…

Brandon Shimoda BLIND CHILDREN When Armando was eleven months old, he went for a drive with his father It’s the first thing Armando remembers: Going for a drive with his father (being in the car…

Geoffrey G. O’Brien NOTHING, EVERYTHING   I have many things to tell you Having nothing to do with each other Except for having itself.   Recently I suffered a mild case. Some things stop…

Ronaldo V. Wilson 47. LUCY AND SHADOW   Leaves grow through porch slats, bursting from the broken steps, the small stones I wish in my mouth.   I cannot speak, but when I have…

Paul Killebrew COMMON POINTLESS   I wonder if I’ve really scrutinized this experience like you’re supposed to have if you can type – Frank O’Hara “For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson”…

Adrienne Raphel IMOGEN AND THE BEGINNING OF COLOR   Imogen had a glass tank and one fish. She loved to look at her fish, slept that she might dream of her fish, looked away…

Tomaž Šalamun THREE POEMS   HUGS   Let’s say, through the crenel, little chains were on arms and   legs too, you don’t hit the whole piece. Usually some storm interweaves.   Roe deers…

Eric Ekstrand LAODICEA   (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.) —“The Wound Dresser”; omitted from the inscription     …

Kara Candito WHISTLEBLOWER   Kara Candito is American. Kara Candito is a field where you threw something at your father and missed. She sits supine in the tall grasses of herself and scratches for…

Rusty Morrison THREE POEMS       RECLAMATION PROJECT                        (WEEDS)   The weight of a ripe nectarine in my palm, a sensation into…

Ross Gay OPENING   You might rightly wonder what I am doing here in the passenger’s seat of this teal Mitsubishi   with the hood secured by six or seven thick strips of duct tape,…

Ari Banias THE FEELING   Each spring, a cloud travels up from the south to an island in the Aegean. The red cloud is coming, the townspeople say. Or, the red cloud has been…

Submissions Our print journal is on hiatus. After this pause, we plan to continue publishing Oversound on a biennial schedule. …

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