Tara Betts: “What Bucks or Breaks”
Today’s featured poem, “What Bucks or Breaks” by Tara Betts, is a wonderful example of how a poem’s structure can enhance its meaning.
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Chloe Martinez: “In Delhi”
The poem is a love song both to my husband and to a city that I find endlessly fascinating and frustrating, and that I miss, especially in this travel-free year. —Chloe Martinez
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Myra Viola Wilds: “Thoughts”
“Thoughts” strikes me as a perfect poem to consider around the end of one year or the beginning of another as we take stock of what has come to pass, and make plans and resolutions for the future.
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Alicia Ostriker: “Ghazal: America the Beautiful”
Today’s poem by Alicia Ostriker reminds us of “our earnestness our sincerity / in first grade when we learned” the song, suggesting that such qualities might be part of why these lyrics stick with us so long.
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Allison Adelle Coke Hedge:
“America, I Sing You Back”
In “America, I Sing You Back,” to frame America as a child who makes mistakes “as any child might do” is ultimately to offer the possibility of redemption and restoration.
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Joy Harjo: “An American Sunrise”
Joy Harjo’s “An American Sunrise” is the title poem of a collection concerned with years of violence against and displacement of Native Americans at the hands of settler colonists.
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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: “Aunt Chloe’s Politics,” and Marilyn Chin: “19th Amendment Ragtime Parade”
Today’s poems continue the Poetry Sunday special series which, through November, will feature poems by women about voting, and about our country. They emphasize the urgency and potency of the vote, reminding us of the difficult paths many have walked to secure our representation.
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Maw Shein Win’s ‘Storage Unit for the Spirit House’
To enter the spirit houses, storage units, and myriad spaces Maw Shein Win opens for us in the pages of her new collection is to enter a universe where familiar objects and structures take on new shapes and significance.
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Gail Newman: “The Dispossessed” and “Two Tales”
“The Dispossessed” and “Two Tales” are only two of many poems in 'Blood Memory' where Gail Newman navigates complex, painful territory with an incisive use of poetic craft and an abiding, enduring love for her family.
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“Pyriscence” by Angelique Zobitz
As a Black Woman, I needed to tell this story of Black Women adapting, thriving, living, and/or dying in suboptimal conditions.
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“有 識: Have Knowledge” by Paisley Rekdal
Paisley Rekdal’s “有 識: Have Knowledge” moves the reader through questions posed by immigration officials to Chinese immigrants entering the United States during the Chinese Exclusion Act.
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Poems by francine j. harris
Rather than decode every reference in the poem, however, I’m eager to experience the musicality of it, to listen to the opening, and see how it squares with the poem’s first line: “The tension is in drag. the rug of hot winter rain. the droll swish tires.”
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“Self Portrait con Valencia” by Lupita Eyde-Tucker
“Self Portrait con Valencia” deftly charts the bilingual experience in addition to the social one, crafting a subtle metaphoric relationship between the elements of the periodic table and language.
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Yolanda J. Franklin: “Climaxes & Joints”
In this poem, the speaker moves via stream of consciousness, shifting back and forth between various characters, memories, and histories to create an expansive sense of various kinds of “climaxes” and “joints.”
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Crystal Williams, “Double Helix”
The poem was written in response to the convergence of multiple artistic endeavors, each of which spoke strongly to me about history—one was the 'Migration Series' exhibit at MoMA for which the poem was commissioned, and one was the book 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'
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