March 29, 2026
Andrew Hemmert
Andrew Hemmert is the author of No Longer at This Address (University of Pittsburgh Press), Blessing the Exoskeleton (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared in various magazines including Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, and The Southern Review. He lives in Thornton, Colorado.
The path forward is brittle and impossible to read
so I will live my one life like these yellowjackets,
whom winter will kill. Full of sweetness sleeping in the apples.
I feel more intimately familiar with failure than its alternative success. I do think failure is instrumental in the human striving that creates art, and failure possibly drives all progression in human development. We make changes because prior actions have resulted in failure. In this way failure is the engine of much change, positive and negative.