These three Lucille Clifton poems are ones I love for their fresh, fierce, and sassy voice; compression; deceptively simple diction; rejection of punctuation and other conventions; humor and honesty; and above all, their joyous message of female empowerment, agency, and strength.

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.

I wrote “Tree of Life” after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, to honor and grieve for my friend, Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, and the other beautiful souls who lost their lives that day.

Sometimes we rely on poetry as a sort of goad—to bear witness, expose evil or hypocrisy in others, or expose ourselves to ourselves.

“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.

Each column (including these three on Jane Hirshfield, one of my all-time favorite contemporary poets) was an exciting discovery and a lesson, not just in craft, but also in the endurance and resilience of the human spirit.

In Patricia Smith’s exquisite collection 'Blood Dazzler,' I find myself drawn to the stories of resilience even more for the comfort and reassurance they provide. The durability of the collection speaks to the hope and lingering fear in this pandemic moment.

Silvina López Medin’s poem is from her newly published book 'Poem That Never Ends,' itself a study of loss, multiplicity, and containment in terms of form, language, and content.