Monika Cassel

So excited to share four poems from a collaboration I'm honored to be working on with @christophernelson.bsky.social!!! These are wild, wonderful poems. Take a look!

from No One’s Woman - Asymptote TISSUE SAMPLE : PENELOPEpenelope waits waits for whatwaits penelope? does calypso wait circe wait scylla charybdis sirens wait all all for one only: the one the other—different fr...

Delighted to share translations from a project I'm working on with the amazing @monikacassel.bsky.social: four poems from Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau, a brilliant, hallucinatory re-telling of the Odyssey. Thanks to Asymptote for believing in the work.
www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/no-on...

Summer 2025 Open Reading Period Report & Finalists!

Summer 2025 Reading Period Report & Finalists newsletter is here! 🎉🎉🎉

Super-excited to have my long poem "Sightlines" out in Under a Warm Green Linden 19. Long poems are my favorite poems to read and to write, and this one--about matrilineal connections, history, and art-making--is especially dear to me. www.greenlindenpress.com/issue19

FDA will limit Covid vaccines to people over 65 or at high risk of serious illness, leaders say The FDA announced it will limit access to Covid-19 vaccines going forward to people 65 and older and others at high risk of serious illness

BREAKING: FDA says covid boosters now only for those over 65 or with preconditions. www.statnews.com/2025/05/20/f...

Glass: Five Sonnets MONIKA CASSEL <br> In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for…

Standing underneath the old border between East and West Berlin, @monikacassel.bsky.social finds her family history plastered on the walls. Check out our newest Dispatch at TC Online:

This is what not giving up looks like.

Nation Can’t Believe It On Harvard’s Side

Nation Can’t Believe It On Harvard’s Side

I LOVE THIS POEM! And, like I said, it's so lovely when that jolt of recognition is shared by others--thank you so much for sending it!

ISSUE 32 POETRY THREE POEMS by Nasim Luczaj TWO POEMS by Stefanie Kirby TWO POEMS by Shams Alkamil TWO POEMS by Jill Kitchen A CASE FOR SELF-HARM by Rob Macaisa Colgate WHALE SONG by Rebecca Uhlman S…

And read the rest of our beautiful new issue here! fourwayreview.com/issue-32/

TWO POEMS by Jill Kitchen unearth paper husk of bittersweet, a berry all too bright to summon a child. crisp of snow crust edge before foot weight sinks beneath, into soft. stone wall formed by calloused hands over t…

Today I am reading, and returning, to two beautiful and still poems by @jillkitchen.bsky.social at Four Way Review fourwayreview.com/two-poems-by...

HERRING GULLS by Rachel Trousdale Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher                     —Baudelaire No, Charles: we’re all in an airborne …

Probably the nicest thing about editing for a journal is finding a poem you love, sharing it with others on the team, and finding out that they love it as much as you do! Like this gorgeous poem by @rvtrousdale.bsky.social in our new issue of Four Way Review: fourwayreview.com/herring-gull...

So grateful to be a staff pick!

ON RELENTLESSNESS: "I find the act of writing or creating to be a part of that relentlessness—| wanted the writing to be relentless too, to refuse to stop, to refuse to be small, and to refuse to not contain everything that it could possibly contain, because we're complex people and the art is complex as well." DANIKA STEGEMAN, EP 70

From Episode 70 with @danikastegeman.bsky.social

Listen here: share.transistor.fm/s/997fb4a3

Thrilled to share five sonnets about Potsdamer Platz, my great-grandfather's glass factory, and how the long shadow of totalitarianism persists for decades not only in our landscapes but in ourselves. Thanks to @commonmag.bsky.social for giving these poems a home.

Glass: Five Sonnets MONIKA CASSEL <br> In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for…

Writing from a subway platform, @monikacassel.bsky.social observes Berlin’s broken history, and discovers fragments of her own family in the process.

Don't miss Cassel’s new Dispatch, transmitted through five perceptive sonnets: buff.ly/JrHjSyD

Always a bit of a triumph for me to go to into this store for one book and make it out with only three!

And because I *thought* I had preordered Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens and recently realized, to my dismay, that I had not, they saved me another errand. Somehow I'd also slept on getting Aditi book, so I corrected that error as well.

Photo of a bookshelf at Powell's Bookstore Hawthone Blvd with "Staff Pick" notes for the anthology Attached to the Living World, Material Witness by Aditi Machado, and Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Forensically by Paisley Rekdal

Zipped over to my neighborhood “small” Powell’s yesterday to buy @patrycjasara.bsky.social's We Contain Landscapes and saw, again, that the poetry people there have good taste! Look at @paisleyrekdal.bsky.social and @aditimachado.bsky.social's books!

👇🎯 We are having trouble using proper terminology because it requires us to fully accept exactly what has happened to our country & wrestle with the fact that every single one of our elected representatives in Congress is violating their oaths of office by not immediately impeaching & removing him.

As the author of a history of concentration camps, I would like to emphasize that this is a very bad idea, and we should definitely not do it.

Denver Quarterly 59 #2 arrived in my mailbox today, and I’m thrilled share three sonnets that distill signature moments of my experience being a teen in Germany/U.S. in the 80s. I’m a wordy poet but also love to write sonnet sequences. Grateful to the editors for including me in this fabulous issue!

Monika Cassel Flax Store (Ed. Oberleithners Söhne spinning factory, Halbseit, photo likely 1920s) Dust or light or fiber or slant of shaft or dust of dust or light or afternoon of afternoon of what this century spu...

New poem in @diodeeditions.bsky.social--an ekphrastic piece on a photo of a flax storeroom (circa 1920) in a factory owned by my ancestors in Moravia. Many thanks to the editors for including my poem in this fabulous issue! diodepoetry.com/cassel_monika/

Extraordinary moment — Nancy Pelosi issues a statement calling on Democratic senators to reject the House funding bill, i.e. to defy Chuck Schumer.

"Democratic senators should listen to the women," she says, referring to Murray/DeLauro who want a 1-month stopgap bill instead.

I miss DEI

RED ALERT: Now Is the Moment, Folks Over recent weeks I’ve told you several times that while Democrats are...

RED ALERT: Now Is the Moment, Folks talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/red-a...

Day #1 of BHM: Fasia Jansen. She was born in Hamburg in 1929. She was the illegitimate daughter of Liberian Consul General Momolu Massaquoi. Massaquoi was the grandfather of Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi, Black German-American journalist who worked at Jet and Ebony magazines. 1/

process, so you must contact the organization." Not very encouraging when it seems this may have happened to multiple journals yesterday! Weird.

Oooh--got a reply! "I understand your situation. The platform has an issue that sometimes prevents messages from being sent; however, this does not happen every time. We do not have a way to tell whether a message was sent or what the message was. We are not involved in the organization's...

Update--I ended up writing to Submittable to ask if they let journals know when this happens; they said "some journals don't send emails." This journal always does send them though! Still trying to find out if they tell journals when they know there's been a glitch. Will keep you posted if you like!