BOMB Magazine

1 week ago | bombmagazine.org | Wallace Ludel

One great engine of John Liles’s Bees, And After (Yale University Press), the 119th winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, is how the poet illustrates the profound interconnectivity of the living. We all want what’s best for ourselves and our loved ones, we all have desires, we all want proximity to whatever or whomever it is we call home. The difference between the reader and the stones and critters of the world becomes a matter more of language than of who has how many legs.

1 week ago | bombmagazine.org | Rob Arcand

For Jennifer Walshe, the term composition names an expansive field of experimental techniques, not a routine process of any sort. Long before becoming a professor of composition at Oxford, she developed an eclectic compositional practice spanning Western art music and DIY traditions, adapting the formal features of opera into works that are affecting, challenging, and often supremely funny.

2 weeks ago | bombmagazine.org | Osman Can Yerebakan

Thaddeus Mosley often prefers to listen to jazz in the comfort of his house in the historic Mexican War Streets district of Pittsburgh. “I am a great jazz lover, but my studio is often too loud to hear anything,” he says, “although music is a nice company to have.” The artist of enigmatically morphed wooden sculptures pays attention to his own rhythm between the hand and the log, which is oftentimes cherry, walnut, or hickory.

2 weeks ago | bombmagazine.org | Tiana Reid

When I first encountered the work of Torrey Peters, I was struck by how she writes about gender with a fascinating duality—part intellectual, part provocateur. Her debut Detransition, Baby (One World, 2021), was framed as a trans soap opera but reached far beyond, tapping into something deeper and more complicated. Now, her follow-up, Stag Dance(Random House, 2025), arrives when transgender rights are under even more relentless attack.

3 weeks ago | bombmagazine.org | Bibi Deitz

The first time I met Jemimah, she told me that she knew from a young age she wouldn’t be rich because she wanted to write. Her declaration was met with agreement and laughs around the table. We were at a dinner in San Francisco with other artists and writers after a friend’s book event, and it was clear that none of us created art because it was lucrative. But I spent the rainy drive home ruminating on Jemimah’s words and the way she said them.