The poem makes us laugh when we read it, but like all the best laughter, it comes with a gut punch. The idea of having an inner bitch who gets to unreservedly express our feelings towards an ex—well, that is funny. But also painful.

In today’s poem, “Poem,” by Joan Naviyuk Kane, the speaker’s search for a word in Inupiaq, the language of her mother, uncovers compounded losses—natural, cultural, ancestral, and personal—that have accrued over time and echo through generations.

What “Figures” seems to be both expressing and enacting is the infinite interconnectedness of things and the way that metaphor (and other figures of speech) can help us in apprehending that mystery.

I love Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “All Hallows Night” because it bridges religions and cultures as a remembrance of people—family members, community heroes, saints, and martyrs—who have died.

These four poems share very similar paths of creation. An unexpected sighting—backyard bird, beloved fossil, lost poet, solar eclipse—set in motion a questioning of inherited models: cultural, cognitive, and physical.

  Lamentation for the Children   Children come, bringing bliss and wretchedness. They come ready to be bruised. Chain us with the soft tentacles of their openness. Leave us pierced and threaded, bound for time with thorns, singing behind the palings of love. Like children. Though we are not. Don’t look back, not once, at the trembling in your arms,…

“Before the Killing Frost” is suffused with longing for the natural world—an almost physical grief at summer’s end—and the longing for a beloved.

In the end, we are left not just with a sense of the speaker’s relationship with her mother, both before and after her death, but also with a sense of the history that made her mother the person she was.