An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
Justin Hamm Whetstone Creek Conservation AreaCallaway County, Missouri By Tom Darin Liskey The plainspoken Midwestern majesty of Justin Hamm’s poetry helped me realize that even though I had seen the world, I’d never really seen my hometown. The day after I graduated...
Ross Gay Sample GatesBloomington, Indiana By Ryan Kegley It is just past dawn, and I am standing in the middle of the Bloomington Community Orchard, the one-acre edible public park that poet, professor, gardener, and self-proclaimed joyologist Ross Gay co-founded. It...
Photo courtesy of the Bass Photo Collection, Indiana Historical Society.
Renee Nicole Good at 34th Street & Portland Ave—protestors murdered by ICE in the Minneapolis Bloodlands. Literary Landscapes by Ellen Lansky with Greta Gaard.
Danez Smith & Black Youth Healing Arts Center—what it takes to create spaces for poets of color to thrive. Literary Landscapes by Chandler Peters-DuRose.
José Olivarez & Calumet City—maps might make the world legible, but poetry reveals “the little cracks in the totality.” Literary Landscapes by Ava Tomasula y Garcia.
Ron Wilson & Lazy T Ranch—the Poet Laureate of Kansas talking poetry and connection with the state’s Poet Lariat.
Lisel Mueller 27240 N. Longwood Dr. Forest Haven, Illinois By Jenny Mueller “Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After...
Gordon Parks & the Marmaton River—walking the cracked bottom of the gulch, following the “documentarian of a watershed century.”
Lorine Niedecker’s River Cabin—America’s greatest unknown poet, writing in a riverside cabin that appears to shrug off the idea of annual flooding.
Philip Levine & Belle Isle—“here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.”
James Tate Cow Creek CrossingPittsburg, Kansas By Leslie VonHolten Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The...
Heid Erdrich & All My Relations art gallery—“imaginative language-meaning” in the American Indian Cultural Corridor.
Gwendolyn Brooks & South Side Community Art Center—looking back toward Bronzeville: Brooks’s voice above the hum. #LiteraryLandscapes
Two generations finding “my truth and my refuge” at the Alliance Public Library. #LiteraryLandscapes by Sean Stewart.
Maya Angelou & the memorial at Lake June—“picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across, imagining the breeze she once breathed.”
Though Piatt’s writing seems “sweet and peaceful,” it “proves to be like ‘the depths of a dark river,’ ‘shadowy and terrible.’”
TED KOOSER Gravel RoadsSeward County, Nebraska By Matt Miller For all his stature as former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser remains a poet of Nebraska, and so he is a poet of gravel roads. Consider “So This Is Nebraska,” his best-known poem about his home...
LiteraryLandscapes: Paradise Valley—Ayesha K. Hardison on artistic signs and negative space in Robert Hayden’s Detroit, Michigan.
Literary Landscapes: John Edgar Tidwell on Langston Hughes, the merry-go-round, and social segregation in Lawrence, KS
Ann Rutledge’s Grave—Jason Stacy on lost love, Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, and exhuming the legends of Petersburg, Illinois.
Central Elementary—Tayler Fox on Naomi Shihab Nye and the effects of imposed divisions in Ferguson, Missouri.