Poetry Unbound

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 Jan 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 Jan 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 Jan 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 Jan 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 Jan 20min

Marie Howe’s poetry shimmers with the keen attention she pays to language: the language of the body (both the human body and “the beautiful body of the world”), of people’s everyday speech, and of rel...

19 Des 202558min

“Spending time in hell is not my idea of something that one should do,” says poet Lorna Goodison, yet she immersed herself there for years to create her extraordinary modern Jamaican translation of Da...

12 Des 202554min

Have you ever gotten consumed by watching a couple argue in public and trying to decipher what’s really going on between them? Denise Duhamel’s deliciously entertaining “How It Will End” offers us tha...

3 Mar 202517min