Celebrate 30 years of the OA.

With original work from Imani Perry, Kristen Arnett, Diane Roberts, and so many others, our Spring Issue honors our past and looks into our expansive future.

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Blue-winged Warbler

Photo by Bernard Hermant via Unsplash

 They say that deep in the interstices

where dream and waking dream and what, between the two, I’ve 
called a life, each crossing the other, 
seem a nest of swords, flashless, as from long neglect, 

          there’s a meadow’s-worth left, still, of the aftergrass 
that grows in sweeter once the first hay-crop’s been cut down, just 
believe in it hard enough, 

everything’s findable, even now, they say (parallel, ascending), but 
                                         that’s not true; not true.





Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips’s new book, Then the War, will be out in early 2022. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.