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.

The homophone of telling and counting speaks to the stories underlying my poems, to the urgency that I need to tell them so they can count. The “underneath” is silence, family secrets and traumas, multiple languages, music. — Leticia Hernández-Linares

A major theme in 'Ordinary Psalms' is the speaker’s incipient loss of sight, a condition with rich metaphorical possibilities for the blindness of humanity in the abstract and also more concretely in recent American political cycles.