In the hands of writers who have the confidence to depart from the rules, poetic forms can marshal tremendous power. Poems like today’s show us just how effectively this can be done.

This is one of the best political poems I’ve ever read, and I hope you will find yourself as moved by it as I am.

Forough Farrokhzad wrote when, as now, Iranian women faced deeply-rooted and widespread discrimination and prejudice, and she is widely regarded as Iran’s leading women poet and an advocate for women’s liberation and independence everywhere.

Both poems this week are in form, and together they help make a point I’ve been pushing for some time in these columns: form can set you free in your writing and reading of poetry.

The poem is somewhat about being alone and a speaker who conjures life into inanimate objects to populate her world.

Every poem in "What My Hand Say" is influenced by the poet’s historical and actual experience with racism, and some take it head-on.

“Prepositional” speaks of a long relationship between the speaker and her beloved and examines the stability of their unit (“us”) against (in relation to) the larger backdrop of history and the even larger backdrop of nature and time, creating a truly unique and universal valentine.

We readers understand that the speaker is in fact weeping at the end of the poem, but we also understand that something powerful is holding her back from acknowledging or owning her tears.