In this concluding episode of "Poems as Teachers," our special miniseries on conflict and the human condition, host Pádraig Ó Tuama says the poems discussed in this offering are a different kind of teacher: “not as teachers that give us rules to follow — more so teachers that share something of their own intuition.” And for a final reflection, he offers Kai Cheng Thom’s “trauma is not sacred,” which speaks directly, fiercely, and lovingly to the pain, scars, and violence that we humans carry and inflict upon one another.Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and community healer. Kai Cheng is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir; the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes at the End of the World (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book); the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book); and the children's books From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li) and For Laika, the Dog Who Learned the Names of the Stars (illustrated by Kai Yun Ching). She won the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2017.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the final episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Kai’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Being right may feel good, but what human price do we pay for this feeling of rightness? Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Place Where We Are Right,” translated by Stephen Mitchell, asks us to answer this question, consider how doubt and love might expand and enrich our perspective, and reflect upon the buried and not-so-buried ruins of past conflicts, arguments, and wounds that still call for our attention.Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and novelist born in Würzburg, Germany, and he lived from 1924 to 2000. His poetry is collected in numerous works, including Open Closed Open, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, and The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.Stephen Mitchell is an author, poet, and translator. His works of translation include The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Gilgamesh, and Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. Mitchell translated The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai with Chana Bloch.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the sixth episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Yehuda’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In “Hebrews 13” by Jericho Brown, a narrator says: “my lover and my brother both knocked at my door.” The heat is turned on, scalding coffee is offered and hastily swallowed, and silence is the soundtrack. What an exquisitely awkward triangle it is, and what a human, beautiful, and loving shape that can be.Jericho Brown is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where he also directs the university’s creative writing program. His books of poetry are The New Testament, Please, and The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the fifth episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Jericho Brown’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In Mosab Abu Toha’s “Ibrahim Abu Lughod and brother in Yaffa,” two barefoot siblings on a beach sketch out a map of their former home in the sand and argue about what went where. Their longing for return to a place of hospitality, family, memory, friends, and even strangers is alive and tender to the touch.Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems: it won an American Book Award and a 2022 Palestine Book Award, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry as well as the 2022 Walcott Poetry Prize. His writings from Gaza have appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub, and his poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and the New York Review of Books, among others.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the fourth episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Mosab Abu Toha’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

We ask questions to find out the facts, but what if you can’t trust the answers, the questions, or the person who's asking the questions? In Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” translated by Evan Jones, leaders exercise a sinister kind of violence — they’ve taken over people’s imaginations with showy displays of wealth and privilege, time-wasting ceremony, and fear coursing beneath it all.Constantine P. Cavafy was a Greek-language poet born in Alexandria, Egypt, and he lived from 1863 to 1933. His poetry has been published in numerous collections, including The Complete Poems of Cavafy, The Collected Poems, and The Barbarians Arrive Today.Evan Jones is a Greek-Canadian poet based in Manchester, England. His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain, was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, and his British debut, Paralogues, was published in 2012. He is the translator of Constantine Cavafy’s The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems & Prose, and his most recent poetry collection is Later Emperors.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the third episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Constantine P. Cavafy’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

As appealing as it may sound, is it really possible to live in a world completely free of conflict? No. And since differences and disagreements are inevitable and natural, Joy Harjo gives ground rules in “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” Her call to us echoes across time and space — a call to listen, to humility, to justice, and to recognizing the land, the living, the dead, the not-yet-living.Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation and the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States. She is the author of 10 books of poet­ry, including An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, and She Had Some Horses, and the memoirs Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior. Her most recent poetry collection is Weav­ing Sun­down in a Scar­let Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years. She’s also produced several award-winning albums of music, including her most recent, I Pray for My Ene­mies.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer two sections of Joy Harjo’s longer poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Host Pádraig Ó Tuama gives an overview of this Poetry Unbound mini season that's devoted to poems with wisdom to offer about conflict and humanity. He also brings us Wisława Szymborska’s “A Word on Statistics,” translated by Joanna Trzeciak, which covers statistics of the most human kind — like the number of people in a group of 100 who think they know better, who can admire without envy, or who could do terrible things. Listen, and ask yourself: Which categories do I belong to? Which do I believe?Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, and she lived from 1923 to 2012. Her poetry is collected in numerous volumes including View with a Grain of Sand, Poems New and Collected, Miracle Fair, and Map.Joanna Trzeciak is professor of Russian and Polish Translation and Translation Studies at Kent State University. She has translated two poetry collections: Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska, which was the winner of the Heldt Prize for translation, and Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and winner of the Found in Translation Award and the AATSEEL Award for Best Scholarly Translation.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Wisława Szymborska’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

If your home were a museum — and they all are, in a way — what would the contents of your refrigerator say about you and those you live with? In his poem “Refrigerator, 1957,” Thomas Lux opens the door to his childhood appliance and oh, does a three-quarters full jar of maraschino cherries speak volumes. Thomas Lux was an American poet and professor. He was the author of several collections of poetry, including To the Left of Time (Ecco, 2016), Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), and New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux: 1975-1995 (Ecco Press, 1999). Lux taught for many years at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he held the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directed the McEver Visiting Writers Program.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Thomas Lux’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

The word “flush” is a verb, as in an activity that we do umpteen times a day. It’s also an adjective that conveys abundance. Fittingly, Rita Wong’s poem “flush” offers a praise song to water’s expansive and unceasing presence in our lives — from our toilets to our teacups, from inside our bodies to outside our buildings, and from our soil to our skies. Rita Wong is the author of several poetry collections, including monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007), and undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). Wong is an associate professor at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Rita Wong’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Bro — this is definitely not the “Beowulf” that you read back in school. Maria Dahvana Headley’s gutsy, swaggering translation brings the Old English epic poem roaring into this century, showing you why this tale of fraught family ties, power plays and posturing, and mighty, imperfect people is as relevant as ever.  Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (MCD X FSG Originals, 2020). Her novel The Mere Wife (MCD X FSG, 2018), an adaptation of the Beowulf poem set in suburban America, was named by The Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction in 2018. Her essays on gender, chronic illness, politics, propaganda, and mythology have been published and covered in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Nieman Storyboard, and elsewhere. She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Maria Dahvana Headley’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

A horse race from the 1980s may not seem like the obvious inspiration for a poem that celebrates so many of the things that make our lives worth living — good company (human and animal), good books, good food, and honest work — and that is just part of the surprise, delight, and surging joy of Michael Klein’s “Swale.” Michael Klein is a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for poetry and is the author of five books of poetry and two memoirs. His work has appeared in many places, including Poetry, Tin House, The Paris Review, and Bennington Review. His newest book is The Early Minutes of Without: New & Selected Poems (Word Works, 2023). Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Michael Klein’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

What holds our bodies together? Yes, there are the biological components, such as the cells, fluids, fibers, but what about the bone-deep stuff, the histories, myths, aches, resolves? In “Our Bird Aegis,” poet Ray Young Bear evokes an adolescent eagle to show how this blend of the visceral, the inherited, and the self-made abides in each of us, no matter our form, wherever we go. Ray Young Bear is a Meskwaki poet and fiction writer. He is the author of several books of poetry including, The Invisible Musician (Holy Cow Press, 1990), The Rock Island Hiking Club (University of Iowa Press, 2001), and Manifestation Wolverine (Open Road Media, 2015). Young Bear is also the author of two novels, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (University of Iowa Press, 1995) and Remnants of the First Earth (Grove Atlantic, 1996).Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Ray Young Bear’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

While disputes over contested lands result in damage that can be seen and documented, they also create countless unseen ruptures in the hearts, minds and souls of the humans caught in the chaos. By giving voice to yearning, Suji Kwock Kim’s poem “Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border” shows how bearing witness and asking the impossible are acts of profound courage, creativity, and defiance. Suji Kwock Kim is a poet and playwright. Her debut poetry collection, Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), was the recipient of the 2002 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and was also shortlisted for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection is Notes from the North (The Poetry Business, 2022). Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Suji Kwock Kim’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In “ROLL CALL: NEW TAROT NAMES FOR BLACK GIRLS,” Amber McBride treats us to a playful litany of language that twists and leaps and never stumbles. Flavored with old-time Christianity, old-time hoodoo, and a modern alchemy all her own, it talks back to prejudice, reclaims the words meant to take people down, and forges new identities that shimmer with strength and strangeness. Amber McBride is an English professor at the University of Virginia. She is the author of several books, including the forthcoming poetry collection, Thick with Trouble (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House, 2024). Her debut young adult novel, Me (Moth) (Square Fish/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, 2023) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it also won the 2022 Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe Award for New Talent. McBride low-key practices hoodoo and high-key devours books (100 or so a year keep her well fed). She is a bit of a book dragon; she collects more than she reads. In her spare time, she enjoys pretending it is Halloween every day, organizing her crystals, watching K-dramas, and accidentally scrolling through TikTok for 3 hours at a time. She believes in ghosts, and she believes in you.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Amber McBride’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

A fragile and wondrous technology that we all possess, the human breath powers any number of things in our lives — speeches, feats of music, athleticism, and more. Carl Dennis’s powerful and meditative poem “Breath” calls on us to take a moment, give our breath our full attention, and celebrate it. Carl Dennis is the author of 13 works of poetry, including Earthborn (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House, 2022), as well as a collection of essays called Poetry as Persuasion (University of Georgia Press, 2001). In 2000, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his contribution to American poetry. His 2001 collection Practical Gods (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House) won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Buffalo, New York.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Carl Dennis’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Our lives are filled with distances, the physical spans that we travel but also the stranger, vaster expanses between our past and our present or between feeling anchored and connected and feeling terribly alone. A poem can capture all of those in a way that a map can’t, as Elisa Gonzalez superbly demonstrates in “To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self.”Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University MFA program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut poetry collection is Grand Tour (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023).Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Elisa Gonzalez’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Most of us do our eavesdropping shyly and secretively, but Ofelia Zepeda’s poem “Deer Dance Exhibition” welcomes us to listen in on an exchange between people as they watch a ceremonial dance. Along the way, we get the sense that what we’re witnessing is more than a conversation — it’s the sounds and sensations of life itself. Ofelia Zepeda is a poet, Regents Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education. She is the current editor of Sun Tracks, launched in 1971 and one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. Her current poetry books include: Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (The University of Arizona Press, 1995), Jewed ‘I-hoi/ Earth Movements (Kore Press, 2005), and Where Clouds are Formed (The University of Arizona Press, 2008). Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Ofelia Zepeda’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Even in the most uneventful of human lives, uncertainty and doubts will inevitably intrude. When faced with those, what can you do to steady yourself? One suggestion: Turn to the poem “When in Doubt” by Sandra Cisneros, where she generously shares some of the wisdom that she’s gleaned over the years. Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. Cisneros’s most recent collection is Woman Without Shame (Knopf Publishing Group 2022). Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, national and international book awards, including the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. More recently, she received the Ford Foundation's Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2022, she was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. We’re pleased to offer Sandra Cisneros’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

To be alive is to be in conversation with the dead. The ghosts of loved ones are always swirling around us, and sometimes we’re lucky enough to catch a glimpse. In the poem “Three Mangoes, £1,” Kandace Siobhan Walker describes a surprising encounter with her late grandmother at a busy market, and an encounter with a stranger.Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee, and Welsh heritage. Her poems have appeared in Magma, The White Review, Poetry Wales, and a number of anthologies. She is the author of the pamphlet Kaleido (Bad Betty, 2022). In 2021, she was both the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and the winner of the White Review Poet’s Prize. In 2019, she won the Guardian 4th Estate BAME short story prize. Cowboy, her debut full-length collection from CHEERIO Publishing, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2023.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Kandace Siobhan Walker’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

It is an intimate thing, to watch a lover while they sleep. In Francisco Aragón’s translation of Francisco X. Alarcón’s homoerotic poem, “Asleep You Become a Continent,” a man views his sleeping lover’s body like it’s a landscape: legs underneath sheets become mountains and valleys. The waking lover describes this view like an explorer might an unknown country; wondering what he will find.Francisco X. Alarcón was an award-winning Chicano poet and educator. He authored fourteen volumes of poetry, published seven books for children, and taught at the University of California, Davis, where he directed the Spanish for Native Speakers Program.Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. His books include After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020), Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010), and Puerta de Sol (Bilingual Review Press, 2005).  He’s also the editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). A native of San Francisco, CA, he is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where he directs their literary initiative, Letras Latinas. His work has appeared in over twenty anthologies and various literary journals. He has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, art galleries, the Dodge Poetry Festival, and the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. He divides his time between South Bend, IN, and Mililani, HI.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Francisco Aragón’s translation, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Conor Kerr’s “Winter Songs” depicts a future scene: coyotes roaming through a rewilded city, digging up the bones of Indigenous ancestors who then regenerate and reclaim what was taken. Power is dismantled, something original is restored.Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer living in Edmonton. A member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, he is descended from the Lac Ste. Anne Métis and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His Ukrainian family are settlers in Treaty 4 and 6 territories in Saskatchewan. He is the author of the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers and Old Gods, as well as the novel Avenue of Champions, which was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize, and won the 2022 ReLIT award. Conor is an assistant professor at the University of Alberta where he teaches creative writing.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Conor Kerr’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Valencia Robin’s poem portrays a tense relationship between mother and daughter; perhaps each resembling the other too much. In desperation — and shock — the daughter says the worst thing she can think of to her mother. What follows is like the fall of a dictator, a coup, an end, an opening.Valencia Robin is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes poetry, painting, collage, and sculpture. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, her debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, won Persea Books’ First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was named one of Library Journal’s best poetry books of 2019. A co-founder of GalleryDAAS at the University of Michigan, Robin has an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. Robin currently teaches at East Tennessee State University and lives in Johnson City, Tennessee.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Valencia Robin’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In a poem about how a small moment can help you make a wise decision, Eugenia Leigh finds the strength to go back home after storming out. No self-pity in the poem, just humor and brilliance. She had every reason to leave, and finds every reason to return. Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of two collections of poetry, Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (2014), winner of the Late Night Library's 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry, as well as a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. She currently serves as a poetry editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary, a BIPOC-focused literary journal and literary arts organization.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Eugenia Leigh’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes. 

Friends, Pádraig here — we are awakening your Poetry Unbound feed to share this brilliant episode from the newest season of On Being, which is well underway. Conversations on love and loss, comedy and ecology, social creativity, poetry, and more all await you in the On Being feed — subscribe now and don’t miss out.And — Poetry Unbound Season 8 is in production and will be arriving this winter.  And now...This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed, but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-world laboratories for him to investigate the entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body — and the related entanglement between history and place. His poetic sensibility has singularly opened readers to approach a generative reckoning with American history — on whatever side of that history our ancestors stood. Clint Smith has a way of making reckoning possible at a humanizing, softening, bodily level — in the marrow, you might say, of our bones. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and many other honors. His poetry collections are Counting Descent and Above Ground.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

A central duality appears in the work of Henri Cole: the revelation of emotional truths in concert with a “symphony of language” — often accompanied by arresting similes. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Henri, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they discuss the role of animals in Henri’s work, the pleasure of aesthetics in poetry, and writing as a form of revenge against forgetting.Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia. He has published many collections of poetry and received numerous awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are a memoir, Orphic Paris (New York Review Books, 2018), Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), and Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). From 2010 to 2014, he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems are filled with butchery and blood as she carves space for desire, motherhood, and an encyclopedic knowledge of plants to coexist in life and on the page. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Aimee, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they explore the beauty of solitude, eroticism in poetry, and a letter writing practice for taking inventory of a life.Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a book of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, 2020), which was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN, and Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Through her poetry, Patricia Smith generously, skillfully puts language around what can be seen both in the present and deliberately looking back at oneself. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Patricia, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they explore how memory, persona, and a practice of curiosity inform Patricia’s work, and the ways writing a poem is like writing a piece of music.Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023); Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. Smith is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, a visiting professor in creative writing at Princeton University, and a faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts postgraduate residency program.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

So much of what was once deemed impossible was found — during Covid — to be possible. Here, a poet watches a tent, a huge temporary hospital, be raised up on the green of Central Park, a place she’d previously walked her dog.Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), which was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She is also the author of two chapbooks, both from the Diagram Chapbook series: You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave (New Michigan Press, 2018) and The Bees Have Been Canceled (New Michigan Press, 2017). She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University. She is Director of Creative Writing at the Nightingale-Bamford school, where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings. She holds degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College, and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Maya C. Popa’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

How to remember a beloved who died tragically, violently? Remember the violence? Sometimes, yes. But also this: remember his love of flowers.Jenny Mitchell is the author of the poetry collections Her Lost Language (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2019) and Map of a Plantation (2021). Her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man (2022), is a Poetry Kit Book of the Month. Mitchell is a winner of the Poetry Book Awards and joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize. She is also a recipient of the inaugural Ironbridge Prize, the Bedford Prize, and the Gloucester Poetry Society Open Competition. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Jenny Mitchell’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

What self-consciousnesses do artists carry? It can be difficult to know how to hold onto confidence in your work, especially when small jibes from others remain long after apologies have been offered. Art compels and calls, and also complicates.Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), won a Northern Writers Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015); a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022); a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir forthcoming from Icon in the U.K. and Norton in the U.S. Ravinthiran is an associate professor of English at Harvard University.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Vidyan Ravinthiran’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

A poet reads to a room full of youths who seem to have some residual resentment to the poet. The poet doesn’t mind — he understands, and calls on the listeners to share in the power of focused anger, to make it a motivation for their creativity.Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) is the author of The Feathered Heart (Michigan State University Press, 1998) and Exploding Chippewas (Triquarterly Books, 2002). He lives in Chicago, where he teaches at DePaul University.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Mark Turcotte’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

What do sandwiches, laundry, therapy, childhood homes, and forgiveness have to do with each other? Wo Chan weaves a poem that charts the many things a single day can hold.Wo Chan is a poet and drag artist who performs as The Illustrious Pearl. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (Nightboat Books, 2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Wo Chan’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

A note from the Poetry Unbound team:We’ve updated the audio for our episode “Amanda Gunn — Ordinary Sugar.” This updated version includes an additional stanza initially omitted from the recording and additional reflection from Pádraig.How can russet potatoes be made to taste of sugar and caramel? By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds.Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is the author of Things I Didn’t Do with This Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Gunn is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard, where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Photo credit: Moon DuchinFind the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Amanda Gunn’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Old stories — of mythology or religion — have sometimes been depicted as having one narrative and one interpretation. Here, J. Estanislao Lopez takes on the voice of a character whose story ended in violence, inviting listeners to claim their agency as this character claims hers.J. Estanislao Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books, 2022). His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and Poetry Magazine, as well as the anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. Lopez received his MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer J. Estanislao Lopez’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

We are delighted to offer this extended conversation between host Pádraig Ó Tuama and the poet Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe. Together, they take a deep dive into the story and language of her poem "Blue," featured in Season 7 of Poetry Unbound, as well as Sasha's beginnings in poetry.Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe is the author of Rose Quartz. She is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Red Paint, and holds a double MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Yellow Medicine Review, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She lives in Tacoma, Washington.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.Listen to our episode featuring Sasha’s poem “Blue,” and stay connected with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

In a poem that explores a story of a name, a story of a color, a story of a sound, a story of an identity, a the story of a person — we hear of ancestors, childhood innocences, exclusions, memories, sensualities, and the way that the dead are not always dead.Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe is the author of Rose Quartz. She is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Red Paint, and holds a double MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Yellow Medicine Review, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She lives in Tacoma, Washington.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Find the companion bonus episode in your feed, with Pádraig Ó Tuama in conversation with Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe.

On one particular day, a poem places events alongside each other, the ordinariness of each event casting the other events into light and shade.Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: Poems (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Charif Shanahan’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Why do we do the things we do when we’re young? Brenda Cárdenas recalls nights sneaking out of the house as a teenager, looking for highs, looking for company. “Why would you do that?” is the adult question throughout the poem. “Why wouldn’t I?” is a reply.Brenda Cárdenas is the author of the poetry collection Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023). Cárdena’s works include Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009), the chapbook Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors (Decentralized Publications, 2011), co-authored with her husband Roberto Harrison, and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, 2005). She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001). She has served as faculty for the CantoMundo writers’ retreat and as Milwaukee Poet Laureate. She currently teaches creative writing and Latinx literature at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Brenda Cárdenas’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

An item of clothing — the blouse of a grandmother — is praised for its artistry, is remembered for how it sits on the body. And then, having been lost, is remade, refined, and reimagined on a new body that recalls the bodies of women of previous generations.Nithy Kasa is a Dublin-based poet of Congolese origin. Published in poetry magazines such as Poetry Ireland Review and anthologies like Dedalus Press’s Writing Home: The New Irish Poets, her work can also be found in the archive of the University of Galway and University College Dublin special collections. Her debut collection of poetry, Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho (Doire Press, 2022), was listed among the top poetry books of 2022 by The Irish Times.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Nithy Kasa’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

What might have been? A poet recalls flirtations and electric connections that could have led to a different life.Selina Nwulu is a writer of Nigerian heritage who is based in London. Her poetry and essays have been widely featured in a variety of journals, short films, and anthologies, including the critically-acclaimed anthology New Daughters of Africa. Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip, was published in 2015 by Burning Eye Books and is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. She has toured her poetry extensively, both internationally and throughout the U.K. in a number of cultural institutions. She has also been featured in Vogue, ES Magazine, i-D, and Blavity, among others. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, and Polish, and exhibited in Warsaw, New York, Dublin, and Glasgow. She was the Young Poet Laureate for London in 2015-16, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She was also a finalist for the 2021 U.K. Arts Award for Environmental Writing. A Little Resurrection is her debut full-length collection. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Selina Nwulu’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

If you had to make a self portrait of your daily morning routine through language and sensation, what would you include? John Lee Clark offers memories of a birthday through experiences the body holds.John Lee Clark is a DeafBlind poet, essayist, historian, translator, and an actor in the Protactile movement. He is the author of the poetry collection How to Communicate (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022) and the essay collection Where I Stand (Handtype Press, 2014). Clark is a 2021-2023 Bush Leadership Fellow, a core member of Protactile Language Interpreting National Education Center, and a research consultant with the Reciprocity Lab at the University of Chicago.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer John Lee Clark’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

A memory from childhood is viewed through the lens of the Malaysian poetic form of pantoum. New things emerge when lines break and reform with new associations.Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a 2022 recipient of a Tin House Next Book residency, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship Award at MacDowell. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Literary Hub, them, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, The Maine Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. For more information, visit kaybarrett.net or find them on social media at @brownroundboi.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Kay Ulanday Barrett’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

If you could put a lock of your hair under a microscope, what would it contain? DNA certainly, but here in dg nanouk okpik’s poem, the hair also contains memory, smell, location, disease, dreams, and medicine.dg nanouk okpik is Iñupiat-Inuit from Alaska. Her first book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), won the American Book Award and May Sarton Award. okpik was long-listed for the PEN American Award for Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022). She is a Lannan Fellow with the Institute of American Indian Arts. okpik resides in Santa Fe, NM.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer dg nanouk okpik’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Pádraig reflects on the transformative force of poetry, and Krista joins with an invitation to pay tribute to the ongoing work of Poetry Unbound.Make a gift and learn more at onbeing.org/LoveUs.

A social worker holds a group for teenagers at a school. They only half pay attention to him. Then something happens, and they pay attention to each other.Benjamin Gucciardi was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His first book, West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021), chosen by Elena Passarello as the winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in Oakland, California through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Gucciardi’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Have you ever had a private moment — perhaps in the middle of the night — in a large city? When it just seems like it’s you and the great dreaming metropolis? Rowan Ricardo Phillips brings us into a memory he can’t forget, complete with a Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack.Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Heaven (2015), Living Weapon (2020), and the forthcoming Silver (2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new, forthcoming edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (Picador, 2019). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Whiting Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the president of the board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic. Phillips received his doctoral degree in English literature from Brown University.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

In a poem of strict rhymes and old forms, Alexander Posey (1873-1908), a poet of the Creek Nation, poses challenges to pomposity.Alexander Posey was a poet, editor, and satirist born in 1873 in the Creek Nation. Posey was the publisher of the first Indian-published daily newspaper, the Eufaula Indian Journal.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Alexander Posey’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

In a church there are liturgies and prayers and statues. But in José Olivarez’s poem, there are more urgent things taking place, things that have “no time to wait.”José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants.  He is the author of Promises of Gold, a collection of poems. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhereFind the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer José Olivarez’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.