What Is Underneath by Danielle Speakman

ROOM 6.26, Poems

Danielle Speakman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, MA. She is a graduate of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her enduring interest is in Jungian depth psychology, and she seeks to hold a therapeutic space where existential and spiritual questions are welcome. She views writing as a form of activism, love, empathy, and attention—essential to all that she does. She believes each of us has a part to play in the particular cosmos of our time. In these moments of helplessness, uncertainty, and war, poetry has become her way of reaching toward others, almost like passing someone a love note. She has been especially deepened by her doctoral work interviewing street children in Lima, Peru, which has continued to connect her to Latin America. She also practices and teaches yoga, which she believes keeps her honest, rooted in her body, and resistant to the pull of abstractions.

THROW YOUR INHERITANCE AWAY by Mahsa Nourzadeh

ROOM 6.26, Poems

Mahsa Nourzadeh (Mahsa Nouri) is an Iranian poet who writes in both Persian and English. She has not only found poetry a means to share her feelings and heal her wounds but also considers translation an adventurous and helpful path. She translates her thoughts and feelings into poetry, her poems into another language, sometimes into another art form, and finally into the feelings of the audience, using translation as a way to communicate. With each step along this path, she aims to shed new light on the depths of her own and the audience’s feelings, beginning the healing of unspoken pain. You can read her other works in Spellbinder magazine and Encyclopedia Prismatica.

Roses began by Ann Shenfield

Poems

Ann Shenfield works across various media. Her animated films have received local and international prizes including selection to the Berlin film festival. Her poetry has received numerous awards including the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her book A Treatment (Upswell Publishing) was listed in The Age Best Books 2023. She is a practicing psychoanalyst (Candidate) and member of the Australian Center for Psychoanalysis.

Coping Strategy by John Pring

Poems

John Pring is a poet and author based in the UK, where he is an MFA candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has poems published or upcoming in Epiphany, The Comstock Review, SoFloPoJo, Poetics, B O D Y, The Passionfruit Review, The King’s English Society, Panorama, Months To Years, and others.

My lyft driver and I by Ariana Suits

Poems

Ariana Suits is working towards her master’s degree in history with a focus on Latin America. Her Ecuadorian heritage and graduate studies are common themes in her poetry. She has been published in both academic and literary journals, most recently in The Braver Collective, with work soon to be featured in Scapegoat Review.

Inheritance by Natasha Kinsella

Poems

Natasha Kinsella is an Irish poet and essayist drawn to the places where faith, silence, and inheritance converge. Her work listens to what the body remembers when language falters. It has been highly commended in the 2025 Patrick Kavanagh Award, awarded second place in the New Writers Poetry Prize (Anthology), and published in Abridged and Beyond Words magazine.

Late Grief by Nan Cohen

Poems

Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poems and the chapbook Thousand-Year-Old Words (2021). She is a past recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and an NEA Fellowship. She teaches high school in Los Angeles and co-directs the poetry programs of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

oranges by Kathleen Hellen

Poems

Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks.

You Will Accuse Me of Sentimentality by D.M. Black

Poems

D.M. Black is a Scottish writer and retired Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society. His translation and commentary on Dante’s Paradiso is due out in the NYRB Classics series in August 2025. A collection of psychoanalytic papers, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective, was published in 2024.

The Ever-Restless Voice by Mary Buchinger

Poems

Mary Buchinger, whose recent books include Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award), and The Book of Shores (2024) and Virology (2022), both from Lily Poetry Review Books, is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize. She volunteered for Peace Corps in Ecuador, served on the New England Poetry Club board for many years, and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. Her poetry appears in AGNI, Plume, Salamander, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere.

Like, adults by Ann Shenfield

Poems

Ann Shenfield works across a number of media. Her animated films have received various international honors including selection in the Berlin Film Festival. Her poetry has also received numerous awards including the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her poetry book A Treatment (Upswell Publishing) was listed in The Age Best Books of 2023. Last year, she completed a four-year program of clinical and theoretical studies at the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, where she is currently a member.

Six Short Poems on the Iran-Iraq War by Ali Asadollahi

Six Short Poems on the Iran-Iraq War by Ali Asadollahi

Poems

Ali Asadollahi, an award-winning Iranian poet, is the author of six Persian poetry books. Asadollahi is a permanent member and the former secretary of the Iranian Writers’ Association (founded in 1968). His poems and translations are published/forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Consequence, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Guernica Editions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Los Angeles Review, and others.

Nightmare by Nancy Kuhl

Poems

Nancy Kuhl is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently On Hysteria (2022) and Granite (2021). She has studied psychoanalysis as a research fellow at the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis. She is the curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Valley With No Name by Sara Shaheen

Poems

Sara Shaheen was born in Haifa in May 1996 and raised between the mountains of the Galilee in Northern Occupied Palestine, holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and is currently doing her clinical internship in Jerusalem, where she lives today. Her passion for writing poetry started when she was ten, and she’s been writing ever since. 

a waterbottle in gaza by Sara Shaheen

Poems

Sara Shaheen was born in Haifa in May 1996 and raised between the mountains of the Galilee in Northern Occupied Palestine, holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and is currently doing her clinical internship in Jerusalem, where she lives today. Her passion for writing poetry started when she was ten, and she’s been writing ever since. 

AFTER THE SKY RAINED MEN AND HOSPITALS CLOSED DOWN by Katherine J. Williams

Poems

Katherine J. Williams, art therapist and clinical psychologist, was the director of the Art Therapy Program at George Washington University, where she is now associate professor emerita. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies such as Poet Lore, Passager, the Northern Virginia Review, 3rd Wednesday, the Delmarva Review, the Broadkill Review, the Widows’ Handbook, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Her first poetry collection, Still Life, was published in 2022. Some of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.