Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to feature Evan Wang’s poem “Slow Burn” as our first featured chapbook poem of Issue 12: Spring 2026. You can find more poetry in his chapbook, Slow Burn, from Northwestern University Press.
Slow Burn
The living will, every once in a while, resurrect the dead.
—A. J. Bermudez
What is a graveyard
but a garden of corpses?
What is a garden
but a graveyard of flowers?
That which you call love, I wiped off
my body after quick sex.
We met last night.
I sent you my location and my body—a corpse flower.
You traveled far to seed me.
Maybe to see me.
I bit down on firm ghosts
while you plowed me with love.
I flower
the garden you made of this bed.
I headstone the mattress, tired in the morning
light.
This light, it is dead.
Sometimes, the dead love better
than the living do.
I am telling you
what you already know.
Slow burns like me fire
or wink into nothing.
(This poem was first published by Poet Lore. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.)
About the Poem
’Slow Burn’ was written in the quiet between customers when I used to work as a bookseller at an independent bookstore. With my laptop propped on the counter, I spun around in a chair while searching for the next line. Every direction of the poem was uncertain, save for the beginning. Those two questions kept circling my mind, begging to be written into a poem. I knew I wanted to critique the hook-up culture that is so prevalent in gay communities, but how could I do so responsibly? ’Slow Burn’s first draft ended with the line, ’I will be loved,’ but that has been revised into the uncertain conclusion it has today. The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me. Ultimately, it inspired the message and tone of my debut chapbook, named after this piece.
Author Bio
Evan Wang (王潇) is the 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, the first male and Chinese individual to hold this title, and author of Slow Burn (Northwestern University Press, 2026), the youngest winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. His work appears in POETRY Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Waxwing, The Harvard Advocate, and elsewhere. Deemed a “prodigy” by Teen Vogue, he has been featured at and recognized by the Biden White House, the United Nations, Teen Vogue, the Smithsonian Institution, and Google DeepMind. Evan is a first-year student at Harvard College.
From Slow Burn
Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang’s debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic’s answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.
Available from: Northwestern University Press
Contents
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
“The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2026, “Slow Burn” by Evan Wang, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: She wants shimmering scales by Nicole Alston Zdeb
“The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for April 2026, “She wants shimmering scales” from The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb, along with a few words from the poet.
“I wanted to explore how time was registered not only by the calendar and clock, but also in the various utilitarian tasks of my mother’s life.” Read three poems by Ron Mohring, our first biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fuse.”
Three Poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn
“Children in these circumstances are deprived of love at a formative stage and learn to immediately behave like adults without the benefit of the learning path of childhood.” Read three poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn, our second biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Conkers.”