Amanda Hodes is a writer and new media artist. Winner of the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, her debut collection Into the Into of Earth Itself is available for preorder and will be published in September from Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, FENCE, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, AMBIT, West Branch, Raleigh Review, Poetry Northwest, Interim Poetics, DIAGRAM, Academy of American Poets (online), Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Starting Fall 2026, she will be an Assistant Professor of English at Augusta University, and she previously taught creative writing at Oberlin College and Virginia Tech.
The snow-coated blacktop steams. Gas leaks in the basement, mutts whinny at high-pitched steam. A woman exhales on her front porch, molecules tessellate to white steam. The cemetery granite turns to batter beneath rain, crackling, steaming. Domboski’s swing set is consumed by sinkhole—collapse, then steam. Graffiti on Route 61, its valley pried open to choked jaw of steam. Ladybugs climb… Read more →
For E. On days where my body turns brittle, flakes off in your hands thin as bread-shell, can you still hold it? When the wall in our new house resembles the one I stared down while I was drilled years ago and I disappear, retreat into this lonely grotto of skull, even then? Cold night air pinpricks my joints, and… Read more →