Poetry Foundation Magazine, March 2026

by Adrian Matejka (Editor)

Poetry Magazine March 2026

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

Published February 22, 2026

About the author

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany but grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His first collection of poems, The Devils Garden, won the 2002 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books. His second collection, Mixology, was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin Books in 2009. Mixology was subsequently nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He is a Cave Canem fellow and is the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2010, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner among other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where he serves as Poetry Editor for Souwester."

Reviews

[Brooke]

"Poets renew words and phrases poem by poem" -Adrian Matjka, editor.

🌷 Renewal is a fitting theme in this spring issue, and one of my favorite volumes of Poetry Foundation so far this year! Spring is a time for renewal, a season that pairs well with poetry. This volume contained some stunning 'visual poetics' by Julie Ezell Patton, written on scrolls and using other tangible mediums. Line after line felt fresh and revitalized like in lines from a couple of Taylor Johnson's poems:

Your idea of air
previously eclipsed and pilloried
(from: SPECIAL FIELD ORDERS NO.15 (1865))

Consider the veneer of nerve alongside
the lore of the ancient fern who is

is own lover. Or a wolf hiding
a howl up its sleeve.
(from: One ever feels)

🌷Several poems such as "in defense of gold" by José Olivarez and Catherine Pierce's "Domesticity" and "In the Woods All Animals Are Large" felt so complete in their execution and were a delight to read many times over.

🌷I have often felt that Spring is a time for poetry, as ascertained by this volume. The following lines felt sprung from the soil covered earth:

"lost in the vague geography of words / where we find ourselves again"
(translated by Armen Davoudian from the original Persian by Fatemeh Shams)

The rain is the sound of geology breathing.
(Rick Barot, "Capilano"

🌷I will conclude with a very snappy stanza from "How to Play RUN!"" by Craig Morgan Teicher:

"Can you get away from everywhere?
Don't bother trying to hide--
you'll also want to run from there.
You've widened your stride."

[Alan Zhu]

eh.

likes: Ellen Bass's "Wildlife"; Timothy Liu's "I Want It to Be Winter All the Time"; Kandé (tr. Carlson)'s "The Egg and The Stone"; Katana Smith's "Three of Us"; David McCombs's "Green"; Felicia Zamora's "Xibalbá : Rebirth"

[Raytown]

Taylor Johnson was a revelation - what a stunning poet!

[Ajp]

This issue introduced me to Edward Salem's poetry, but my favorite lines are from Jill McDonough: “…we are fighting about money, / which for us looks like a debate about capitalism…”

[Timothy]

All good poems except the last one, that one was definitely not for me