Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Empty Mirror 25th Anniversary

Empty Mirror celebrated its 25th anniversary on May 31, 2025! While we are currently on hiatus, we invite you to enjoy a quarter century of writing and art in our archives.

Click to read any of the pieces featured below, read more from the category, or refresh the page for a fresh selection!

On Literature

17 Syllables: The Death of Traditional Haiku

M.A. Barrett

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass silence

“Only the Lull I Like”: Walt Whitman’s Image of Silence

Andrew Field

More Essays and Interviews

Poetry

San Francisco

David Gitin: 5 From San Francisco in the Sixties

David Gitin

Steamboat Rock / credit: de

Two poems by Constance Schultz

Constance Bacchus

More Poetry

Beat Generation

Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Excerpt from Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Paul Maher Jr.

Kerouac notebooks

Are There Any Good Unpublished Kerouac Books Left?

Paul Maher Jr.

Allen Ginsberg Wait Til I'm Dead Uncollected Poems

Book Review — Wait Til I’m Dead: Uncollected Poems by Allen Ginsberg

Marc Olmsted

On the Road manuscript scroll - Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Manuscript Scroll

Empty Mirror

More About the Beat Generation

Visual Art

city by the sea - Ben Stainton

Collages by Ben Stainton

Ben Stainton

Nastja Säde Rönkkö, Take Me Anywhere, 2016 2 channel HD video, duration 10 min, video/edit Luke Turner

To Ride a Horse: The Art of Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Perceptions of Nature in an Age of Decline

Andrew J. Corsa

More Art

Essays

The Baby in the Air

Max King Cap

peaches

Under His Roof

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

More Essays

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!

Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

There’s more to read!

  • On Literature
  • Beat Generation
  • Visual Art and Visual Poetry
  • Poetry
© 2000–2026 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures