Poetry Magazine, May 2026

Poetry Foundation Magazine

by Adrian Matejka (Editor)

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

Published May 1, 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

[lilly]

the contributions to hard feelings at the end were sensational - particularly on Fear.

[Alan Zhu · Rating 3 out of 5]

somewhere between 3 and 4... a relatively short issue, I think, because of translations and graphs and pictures and essays, but what was there was good.

favorite: Maria Zoccola's "Ithaca"; Jane Wong's "hard feelings" essay on disgust
favorites: Tracy K. Smith's "God of Song"; Carl Phillips's "From Below"; Eugenia Leigh's "Everything Will Be Fucked Forever / A Time of Peace Always Comes Again"; Antonio Ochoa's "From 'Small Sargasso Mountains'"; Halina Poswiatowska (tr. Ryan Mihaly & Karolina Zapal)'s "It Is Spring Again"; the folio of photos

[Sarah]

Favs:

Bin by Bin (Tracy K. Smith, aka my queen)
ithaca (Maria Zoccola)
Antonio Ochoa's series
Proof (Cornelius Eady)
Heedful Hold (Marcus Jackson)
Each contribution to Hard Feelings

[Ajp · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite lines from this issue are from Halina Poswiatowska: “…it’s nice to think / the world will die a little / when I die”.

[Timothy]

Eh not enough poems, the last few articles probably could have been stretched to multiple issues or made into a special limited series