Amsterdam Review

Us v. World Revisited

Fall 2026

Poetry

Whale Sharks by M. Anne Avera
Songs of Nomenclatures by David Axelrod
british english by Harriet Bradley
Selections from The Haptik Poems
by Iain Britton
Performance Space by Daniel Carden Nemo
Solo Shopping at The James Wright Memorial Price Rite by Adam Grabowski
Two by Kevin Grauke
Two by Thomas Heise
Two by Elizabeth Hill
Three by Satoshi Iwai
Two by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
Your sister will argue with you
even on your deathbed by Ella Jeffery
Selected Poems by Ben Jorisch
Tiny Wren by Claire Jean Kim
Adolescence by Jane Lockwood
Dream of the Dead by Patrick Morgan
Two by Jenna Murray
Island: some definitions by Katrina Naomi
Kitchen Sink Apocalypse by Sreeja Naskar
Two by James Norcliffe
The Stain of Holy Water by Garrett Phelan
Two by Frederick Pollack
Today I started to write about America
by Carla Schwartz
To You, Flying Gull by David Sergeant
Three by Alina Ștefănescu
The Corner by Ifera R. Tagatia

Photography

Forest Hanging from Inflection Point

Fiction

Between Worlds by Jason Allen

Big Box Love Story by Theo Greenblatt

Honger by Cristian Leata

Nonfiction

The Never-Beens by Daniel Carden Nemo

A La Calavera Catrina (To the Dapper Skull) by Gabriela Denise Frank

EF5 by Emily K. Lewandowski

Unkempt by Angela Townsend

The Invisibilitarians by Marcia Yudkin

Interviews

The Möbius Strip of Reality and Dream
In Conversation with Mircea Cărtărescu

Chromatic Resonance in a Shared Poetic Space of Consciousness
In Conversation with Diane Sahms

Fine Arts

Focus on Marion Röst

The Never-Beens by Daniel Carden Nemo

A while back, Virginia Woolf warned that the literary gatekeepers of her day clung too dearly to inherited forms to recognize genuine innovation, that they looked for the semblance of known shapes only to declare them formless when new shapes came along. “Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order,” she mused. [Read]

Two
by Thomas Heise

I didn’t want to be myself for a while, / or by myself—being me was lonely / even when I pretended to be / someone else ...

Three
by Alina Ștefănescu

Timelike and blind, I know you / delirium. As light knows its own lisp is what / cools the water’s surface ...

Whale Sharks
by M. Anne Avera

and we’re in the make-a-wish room at the aquarium / ‘cause i have to feed our Louie, settle the tubes that / run in from him and out from him ...

british english
by Harriet Bradley

i’m not being funny but / did you ever stumble half pissed into an east london morning when you’re sour like cranberry, / hang off the phone in a box ...

The Möbius Strip of Reality and Dream

In conversation with Mircea Cărtărescu

Amsterdam Review talks to Mircea Cărtărescu, one of the greatest writers of contemporary fiction, whose singular imagination takes us beyond the realm of literature and into his own dazzling and unsettling world.

Read the full interview

Island: some definitions
by Katrina Naomi

Not sea / Only a fraction of the land mass / is visible / see iceberg / Doesn’t necessarily have palm trees ...

Two
by Elizabeth Hill

When something moves is how you know it’s alive. I cannot see time move, but I try to save it ...

Three
by Satoshi Iwai

I cut you into 1,026 pieces and begin to reassemble them in the air. Several / hours later, you appear in front of me again, but something is different ...

Selections from The Haptik Poems
by Iain Britton

stars hollow out / a night’s thought / a remarkable / resistance occurs / tubes of air are force-fed / into your mouth / you’re more of a conundrum ...

Focus on Marion Röst

In this recent series of paintings by Marion Röst, radiant colors immediately catch the eye, balanced by more muted tones. The visibly energetic movements of the paintbrush pay no heed to the boundaries of the canvas. The paint, applied both opaquely and transparently, creates a lively and varied image.

Selected Poems
by Ben Jorisch

I sit in my apartment dreaming / of the women I’ve been with / whose names I never knew, / their memories completely / undisturbed by their absence ...

Adolescence
by Jane Lockwood

What I knew was I hated everyone / and I wanted to smoke more cigarettes. / I hated the afternoons I spent in parking lots / or by the boat launch, watching ...

Big Box Love Story
by Theo Greenblatt

How much room is there for love in the world? This is a story about loneliness and shame, the fragile hope of wanting to be loved, and how something genuine can be undone by the judgment of others.

Performance Space
by Daniel Carden Nemo

A boat in the middle of a wide field, sleep’s bird’s-eye view folded in. / Dreaming you can see the city without walls. / Each house and street means something more ...

Forest Hanging from Inflection Point

Two
by Jenna Murray

The girl pictures other girls naked, / knows exactly what is underneath / the bathing suit / because she has it, too. / She knows in tenderness / there is no purification ...

Two
by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

Spring makes my arms itch. I‘ll sleep after I put a few / words on paper, I call up from the basement. When I was / young, this was my favorite season ...

Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette by Vincent Van Gogh

A La Calavera Catrina
(To the Dapper Skull)

by Gabriela Denise Frank

"We fool ourselves, labeling only the unwell as terminal, for we each carry an inevitable expiration date. In Western culture, particularly in America, Death is presented as a terminus or a failing of medicine, technology, or fortitude when it is, in fact, a threshold: the grave, like the living body, is a fertile place." [...]

To You, Flying Gull
by David Sergeant

Spread out, O way out and flying / in the blued ellipse of going existence / where only camera-crews and murderers come ...

Dream of the Dead
by Patrick Morgan

The Earth once sang in warbles, / yellow breast of ruffled feathers, / gold face glinting in the sun / as dark olive wings cut the air ...

Two
by Frederick Pollack

The landscape fades, people with it. / The process isn’t painful: it’s more / the way one forgets friends, / who die after many decades ...

Your sister will argue with you even on your deathbed
by Ella Jeffrey

In all other paintings of Dido’s death / it looks like those present / actually care. But here / it may as well be the senate: there’s chitchat and confusion ...

In conversation with Diane Sahms

Diane Sahms discusses her latest collection —of an octopus: an archite|x|tural awareness of words, a book in which every poem is "subjective, meaning it exists as subject-object and therefore, must be met in a viewer-reader’s poetic zone and/or realm of being, existence."

Read the full interview

Tiny Wren
by Claire Jean Kim

You promised I would be captivated. / Then ravaged. Then left inconsolable. / I pictured myself naked on a giant / white bed, my black hair a crow’s nest ...

Song of Nomenclatures
by David Axelrod

I never quite understood how violent it is / To imagine ourselves the subject and everything else / Predicate, as when the Corps of Discovery / Passed along the river ...

Two
by James Norcliffe

Of course there is firewalking: / rockets above, cinders below. / The Dionysian winemaker shakes / his wild white locks and rakes / coals over the sand ...

EF5
by Emily K. Lewandowski

It is a spring evening and I am twelve. The thunderhead is moving in. My family watches from the back porch. The cloudmass spins ...

Detail from The Garden of Earthy Delights

Honger

by Cristian Leata

During the 2018 ecological crisis at the Oostvaardersplassen, thousands of animals starved to death in a fenced, man-made reserve while local authorities and park officials debated intervention. A stark meditation on cruelty and detachment, on appetite and inheritance, on the uneasy distance between the lives valued and those dismissed.

Unkempt
by Angela Townsend

I bought a pearl tiara so I can face my mother on Fridays. I need one day a week when I do not blow-dry my bangs for anyone ...

Solo Shopping at the James Wright Memorial..
by Adam Grabowski

No, not the slow whale of country twilight / but rather the palid valley of divorce. / Fields and fields of cauliflowered linoleum where the produce arrives late ...

Two
by Kevin Grauke

Worse than without, / this horse has but / one wing, shriveled / like youngest lettuce, / too small even to brush / flies away from rippling / hide ...

The Corner
by Ifera R. Tagatia

The angle of the corner, / The sweet union of two walls, / A home for the child bound / In a house of horror and loss ...

by Marcia Yudkin

Wearing perfectly matched colors and patterns, the imitators become unseeable. Inspired by chameleons and tropical flounder, advanced camouflage technologies take such mimicry one step further by changing the match minute by minute. They project images of an ever-shifting background onto a person or thing. The face-off between pursuer and pursued then depends on senses beyond sight. [...]

F E A T U R E D

The Never-Beens by Daniel Carden Nemo

​Threeby Alina Ștefănescu

F E A T U R E D

Three
by Alina Ștefănescu