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

eyes on / horizon by Emilie Kneifel

Emilie Kneifel

eyes on 8 by Emilie Kneifel

torn from a frantic nap into my perch in the corner. drowsy stare makes a masterpiece. the shadow paint. candied branch drip. white shoes on wet grass that glow like a fizz. //// /// /// / /// / … [Read more...]

Intimacy with Doors

Bára Hladík

photo by Daniel Tseng / unsplash

Doors are a foundation of our psyche. To understand this, we must ask ourselves: how do we move through doors, how do we conduct ourselves near doors, as we flit through our busy lives, bags in hand, … [Read more...]

The Yoke of Duty: Of Caregiving and Middlemarch

Kate Washington

Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, Middlemarch

As strong a force as love is, it only got me through the first time I thought my husband was dying. It turned out the motivation that really stuck, what kept me going through the rigors of caregiving, … [Read more...]

Is Southern Art a Thing?: Thoughts from a Technically Southern Arts Writer

Sara Estes

When I woke up this morning in Nashville, I checked, as I routinely do, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Times. When I went to the coffee shop next to my apartment, I encountered more people from … [Read more...]

Yankees in Fairyland: A Review of Take Me Out, by Richard Greenberg

Kenneth Pobo

Take Me Out - Richard Greenberg

Richard Greenberg’s play Take Me Out is as much about the role of the athlete, particularly the baseball “star,” as it is about what makes a team function—and what threatens the unity of a team. The … [Read more...]

Attempt to Hear All the Voices: On the Nature of Essay

Shannon Berg

journal

An essay is an entity in itself that moves, explores, sometimes discovers and enlightens, explains, clarifies, and attempts to relate in some way to the world outside of it. An essay moves on its own … [Read more...]

The Consequences of Violence

Steven Thomas Howell

Afghanistan Sky / U.S. Army

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. —Oscar Wilde I’ve found it true in personal experience that being a target of … [Read more...]

Charles Reznikoff’s “During the Second World War…” as Objectivist Ars Poetica

Chris Mustazza

photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179931106

This essay is dedicated to Charles Bernstein A poem I keep coming back to again and again is Charles Reznikoff’s “During the Second World War, I Was Going Home One Night,”1 first published in … [Read more...]

Cry, Exploration, Ceremony

Winnie Khaw

Howl by Allen Ginsberg / Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko / Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich.

Oppositional postmodernist literature is associated with the Beat movement and came about after the terrible, unforeseen destruction of World War II. While the modernists were positive about the human … [Read more...]

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

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

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2025 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures