'I know I have the blood of survivors coursing through my veins'
This poem will be my statement for a rather abrupt and unexpected ending to my role as the editor of American Life in Poetry. The poem is one of resilience — the resilience of my ancestors and those that carry the fact of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a defining moment in our making. It is also a poem about resilience, about looking hopefully, even if with some caution, to the future, and I be...
10th January 2023
'Now he answers to everything that reminds him of her'
In this moving elegy to his infant daughter, Saddiq Dzukogi reminds us of how complex grief can be. The body’s responses to grief offer a way for us to cope with its deep pain. Here, the poem, 'So Much Memory', is a tender performance in which the poet, beautifully and hopefully, seeks to capture th...
20th December 2022
'Joe stopped, stooped, picked a flower'
It seems clear enough that Quincy Troupe wants his poem, 'Picking a Dandelion', to achieve the coveted status of “timelessness” while being rooted in a historical moment. Here are Joe and Jill, two pe...
12th December 2022
'While there is still some light on the page, I am writing now a history of snow'
Allison C Rollins manages, in this striking poem, to contain the anxiety of those facing sightlessness, and the urgency they feel to try to preserve in memory, that which is fleeting. For her, the poe...
5th December 2022
'The memories shift in their skins at every moon, to do their ripening'
Joy Harjo’s ode to family, to ancestry, and to the woman’s body, truly makes sense if we understand that for Harjo, there is no line separating the natural world and her human body — that for her the ...
29th November 2022
'My husband holds the cold stethoscope to my chest'
I must admit that I leave 'In Patient' still wondering, “Is she all right?” I suspect that Erin Evans knows this, and what she wants to say is that this moment of humour, a distraction from the thing...
22nd November 2022
'I have stuffed the South’s nightlights in my mouth. Gala of fireflies'
Tennessee Hill’s South emerges in her poem as a character, a personage that haunts and possesses her with beauty and a certain disquiet. Her poem, 'Crater Heart', moves from fragmentary image to simil...
17th November 2022
'He’s friendly they yell, 50 yards back'
The title of the poem, 'The Love Ridge Loop', is, no doubt, something of a joke, an exaggeration built on irony. After all, the poem is an ironic love poem, and, at the same time, an anti-dog poem. Bu...
7th November 2022
'The mon tonight is closer to us'
Perhaps we are too close to the monumental moment in history to fully appreciate just how to approach it in poetry, but the poets are writing about this pandemic in the way that poets must — to find l...
31st October 2022
'My father's seat empty, placemat bare'
This is an elegant elegy to a father who has passed, captured in the rituals that families create as a way to remember, to honour and even to celebrate. The extra place set at table before a feast of ...
27th October 2022
'This sea: a Chevy engine revving high reminding me how everything’s design'
In 'Beachcomber Nocturne', Lupita Eyde-Tucker beautifully wrestles with the complex relationship that we sometimes have with nature, by first acknowledging that there is a strange colonising impulse b...
14th October 2022
'We don't remember our birth, when a mother dies, it's gone'
Victoria Chang has an uncanny capacity to contain, in the compact machine of a well-honed poem, so much emotion and meaning. She explores such a core element of what connects us as human beings — the ...
9th October 2022
'You scuff, as you obey'
There is, of course, no hidden chapter in the “Good Book” that explores sandalled Jesus’s fashion rules, but Cornelius Eady in ‘Easter Shoes’ is being funny and deadly serious. The poem takes him back...
29th September 2022
'It's your turn, it's always your turn, the night says'
Rachel Eliza Griffiths has written poems and composed photographs in response to the loss of her mother. She has always been fascinated by the exchange between birth and death that characterises their...
24th September 2022
'Bringing drought when instead we should have deluge'
There is a posture that poets sometimes take, that of the prophet speaking predictions into the world, or simply proclaiming what is happening in the moment. More often than not, the role is reluctant...
15th September 2022
'My seven siblings and I sheltered ourselves inside these labyrinths'
In Heather Cahoon’s poem ‘Shelter’ she manages, with simplicity and the use of deftly selected detail, to capture the mood of childhood delights that, in the manner of such things, always seem on the ...
6th September 2022
'Like dust their lives so small compared to ours'
Roxane Beth Johnson’s elegy to her father is striking for the tender and intimate details that constitute the memory of him, especially his shirts, which become almost talismans for her to explore ide...
30th August 2022
'Home be this small silence you curl into anywhere you go'
Nowhere in her poem, 'Self-Portrait with Impending War', does Lauren K Alleyne mention a war, but the rumours of war and the disquiet of the world seem to haunt this “self-portrait” in which the self ...
22nd August 2022
'One perfect stitch after another perfect stitch'
'Mend' is a poem of great intimacy. L Renée remembers her mother as the mender of garments, and as someone who had a life of rich experiences before the poet was born. This moment of separation descri...
16th August 2022
'It was the eve of war but they didn't know'
War, impending war and exile forced by war, are increasing preoccupations in the work of Ladan Osman — not so much the wars, but the damage that they do to everyday people who are trying to live in th...
16th August 2022
'A tiny magical man makes me an offer'
This poem captures one of the peculiar, private deals that we sometimes make in a world that seems to be marching on, completely out of our control. Some might call it a prayer, or a spell, or a stran...
22nd June 2022
'The coast affirms that lines are always changing'
For Kayleb Rae Candrilli, as for many of us, the dramatic change of setting - in their case, the arrival at the coast facing the grand Atlantic - can shift our sense of being in significant ways. For ...
4th December 2021
'I need you like the earth needed the flood after dearth'
There is a bit of slapstick comedy in this poem of conundrums. In 'Multiple Man: Guest-starring me & You', Gary Jackson knows that he is playing a game with perception — is the “you” himself or someon...
22nd November 2021
'I will miss you, armadillos and ... tarantulas crossing the road in the dark'
There is a certain delightfulness in the rhythm and play of ‘Moving to Santa Fe’ by Mary Morris, in which she enacts the farewell song of someone moving from an old home to a new one. In Morris’ case,...
13th November 2021
'She says she wants to be a queen in her own right'
Humour in poetry does not always soften the blow secreted within a poem. Michelle Peñaloza knows that a tiny grenade sits in the middle of ‘Doppelgänger’, a seemingly passing comment, but one full of...
6th November 2021
'I love you without knowing how or when this world will end'
Craig Santos Perez packs into this love sonnet, 'Love in a Time of Climate Change', echoes of many famous love poems, from Robert Browning’s 'How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)', to Shakespeare’s 'Sonnet ...
25th October 2021
'You see only what you want to see. Maybe you always did.'
The elegant irony of Elaine Equi’s lament - what the Germans, I am told, call, Weltmüdigkeit, (world-weariness) - in her poem ‘In an Unrelated’, about the very contemporary phenomenon of ‘the news cyc...
18th October 2021
'A song sparrow hit the window just as summer began'
Bruce Willard’s poem ‘Song Sparrow’ captures with such intimacy the interruption of the comforting rituals of time: seasons changing, children growing older, water under the bridge, the world continui...
11th October 2021
'wait on the chicken to know he gone and it take a while'
When historical figures become the subjects of poetry, there is a rich opportunity for transporting us into the emotional world of such people through the beauty of the imagination. The facts of Anarc...
8th October 2021
'It's all yours, this father you make each day'
The monk’s tonsure is intentional, a shaved bald spot as part of the rituals of sanctification, but here, in his poem, ‘Tonsure’, Young sees this hereditary marker as a complex sign of the things a ma...
27th September 2021
'We take on trust the dead are buried and gone'
Dorianne Laux is one of our treasured poets. Her elegant poems grow out of the familiar. 'Urn' is beautifully inventive in the way she connects the moment of uneasy childlike delight in the inexplicab...
20th September 2021
'Veiled, he's mysterious as a bride'
What haunts this loose sonnet by Carrie Green is loss, anticipated loss, but loss, nonetheless. Yet, what emerges is an elegant “pre-elegy”. A tender anthem to a father and to the sweetness he represe...
14th September 2021
'It takes three days to tow our brokenness across the state'
Jehanne Dubrow’s finely crafted sonnet, her own “simple machine”, reminds us so well of that moment, full of contradictory emotions, when the things we think are “unfailing”, fail us. She reflects on ...
6th September 2021
'No matter how wide the final margin, a lone ballot never counted so much'
It’s been some months since our last election, but it is always good to be reminded, in this poem by Kamilah Aisha Moon, of how precious and hard-won the right to vote and the act of voting are.
...
30th August 2021
'Lost in a foaming green crawl, I grew smaller than me'
For many of us who live in landlocked states, an encounter with the tumult and power of the sea can be a bracing encounter with nature. Here, in a poem I came across in a clever new anthology called R...
26th July 2021
'I went to the hospital to hear my heart beat in her various chambers'
There is nothing quite like the relief of good news from the doctors. Of course, it is a reminder of the bad news we eventually expect, the faith that the word “cure” demands of us. I have always enjo...
19th July 2021
'I want to kiss them as I hurt to be kissed'
Sasha Pimentel’s poem is a splendid example of the poetic device called the conceit, which refers to an extended metaphor, and of course, the image here is the violin. Yet the title of the poem is tak...
12th July 2021
'The truth is I love watching you trot away from me'
It is reassuring to know that other dog owners struggle with the strange way in which we project our humanity on animals and ignore the implications of such an “unnatural” act. Nikki Wallschlaeger’s n...
5th July 2021
