Issue #4, April 2025

photo by David Ward
Consider haute couture. The fine suit, the grand dress, bespoke, rich with public commentary and private messages. Certainly not made for the public school-goer. Yet anyone can understand hundreds of hours of design, hand-sewing, fittings and more fittings, details in and out that are easy to respect. Even if you would never wear it.
It is easy to admire virtuosity in a handcrafted object. Even if it is too avant-garde for your wardrobe and you don’t “get” all the decisions and references that went into this insane and gorgeous garment (it is, after all, still a garment, distant cousin to a tube top or a pair of cutoffs), honoring its maker is instinctual.
Yet what is a poem, but a handcrafted object? Editing Issue #4 deepened our understanding of why we do what we do here at Public School Poetry. We make criticism a practice of solidarity with other poets when we examine the way a poem is made, instead of just enjoying it, or not. This practice of solidarity underlies our mission: when we poets give our careful attention to a poem we would never write, we make a claim that that poem, as evidence of human creation, is worthy of discussion. Through that discussion, we connect across aesthetics, traditions, histories. We sit at a different table in the lunchroom and see what the conversation is like there. Try it.
-- Megan Levad, Vice-Principal
Memorial
Carrying
For Everything There Is a Season
Five-Paragraph Essay by Shou Jie Eng
深影 The Reflection
蕾丝边 Lesbos
Five-Paragraph Essay by Gahl Liberzon
This is My Secret Society My Private Tribe
Seer
The Distance
Five-Paragraph Essay by Alison Swan
Ode to the Mango
Attempts to Answer
Ode to the Suddenly Wet Sock
Five-Paragraph Essay by Kimberly Gibson Tran
ACT(ION)
CODE OF CONDUCT
The Ancestors Laugh at the Lesser of Two Evils
ALIEN AMERICA
Five-Paragraph Essay by John Popielaski
Extraordinary Measures
A Part of Me Still Thinks Koans Are Conundrums To Be Solved
The Hero's Journey
Five-Paragraph Essay by Patricia Clark
Iphigenia
A Memory of Violence
Little Houses for Little Gods
Five-Paragraph Essay by Dale Going
Terroir
Bull in a Field
Old Bees
Five-Paragraph Essay by Cela Xie
On Subjectivity
Shoreline Sketch
Shoreline Sketch
Shoreline Sketch
Five-Paragraph Essay by Thomas Lynch
Essay by Scott Beal
ANTIGONE CANADENSIS
BELOVED APOSTLE
Five-Paragraph Essay by Jasmine An