Poetry Unbound

What is there to say or do when the life of a loved one has been upended and devastated? Stewart Henderson’s poem “How To Speak Love In A Storm?” offers a tender masterclass in how you can accompany s...

6 Helmi 15min

Dante Micheaux’s rich and rollicking poem “Theologies for Korah” is written on the occasion of an infant’s baptism, but it’s anything but baby talk or bland instruction. Religious figures, rites, and ...

2 Helmi 18min

“How could there be a war in this city?” is the plaintive question that starts Oksana Makysymchuk’s “Arguments for Peace”. Like ours, the world of her poem holds both the “goodness of the universe” an...

30 Tammi 20min

In Armen Davoudian’s casually intimate poem “Coming Out of the Shower”,  mother and son perform their morning routines in the small, shared space of their household’s only bathroom. She chats and puts...

28 Tammi 16min

Some religions and some people have very specific ideas about “grace”, and that includes poet Orlando Ricardo Menes. In the carefully constructed “Grace”, he manages to both demystify and remystify wh...

23 Tammi 15min

In fewer than two dozen lines, Cyrus Cassells’s poem “Jasmine” offers readers a multisensory, cinematic immersion into late spring life in Rome. Not only is the “sweet, steady broadcast” of jasmine ev...

19 Tammi 14min

W.S. Merwin’s “For The Anniversary of My Death” is a slim, precise poem — just 13 lines made up of 84 words — about the very weightiest of subjects, one’s future death. With it, Merwin has crafted an ...

16 Tammi 15min

Words can’t quite fully capture the activity, oddity, and awe that is everywhere around us, but poet Kimberly Blaeser makes a gorgeous attempt in her poem “my journal records the vestiture of doppelga...

12 Tammi 20min