Articles, News, and Commentary

April 05, 2025

Max Roland Ekstrom

File Under: news

One July evening in 2022, amidst dwindling mask mandates and growing sense of new prospects, one of those “now or never” feelings arose, and Keeley and I began *The Pierian*. We knew the market for lit mags was crowded, but we had a unique vision—not a classically-themed literary ...

Top Poet: The Next Hit Show?

February 15, 2025

Max Roland Ekstrom

File Under: News

As AI increasingly bests human doctors, lawyers, and perhaps soon [even poets](https://www.thepierian.org/article/8482f7ddc33074614579b3a6c653e326/Rise\_of\_the\_Machines), it’s fair to ask “how could a device capable of nothing more than calculation…possibly beat a human with a lifetime of experience, instant pattern recognition, [and] ...

Elise Paschen in Review

February 01, 2025

Keeley Schell

File Under: Commentary

The cover of Elise Paschen’s poetry volume depicts a waterfall descending from a rocky crag and filling a small pool surrounded by pines, under a starry sky. This illustration, by Irene Lam, captures the tone of more poems in the book than the title (*The Nightlife*) does. There is ...

Rise of the Machines

January 19, 2025

Max Roland Ekstrom

File Under: News

Key to so many *Star Trek* plots and the great sci-fi films of my childhood, from *The Terminator *to *The Matrix* to *Bladerunner, *is the conceit of living in a world where it’s impossible to tell who is real and who is a simulation. While we *probably *don’...

Our Poetry Community

December 30, 2024

Pierian Staff

File Under: News

What makes a community? Before starting *The Pierian*, we met by phone with Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, the longtime editor and publisher of a Maine-based print poetry journal we admired, *The Aurorean*. This journal had nurtured a community of New England-based writers. Poets gathered for readings at regional bookshops ...