'The coast affirms that lines are always changing'
For Kayleb Rae Candrilli, as for many of us, the dramatic change of setting - in their case, the arrival at the coast facing the grand Atlantic - can shift our sense of being in significant ways. For the poet, their affirmation “that lines are always changing” brings a certain comfort. Even more significant is the epiphany that ends the poem: “the tide tells me/ my body can morph/ as many times as...
4th December 2021
'I need you like the earth needed the flood after dearth'
There is a bit of slapstick comedy in this poem of conundrums. In 'Multiple Man: Guest-starring me & You', Gary Jackson knows that he is playing a game with perception — is the “you” himself or someone else — perhaps a past lover? But in the end, it does not matter, because the sense of loneliness ...
22nd November 2021
'I will miss you, armadillos and ... tarantulas crossing the road in the dark'
There is a certain delightfulness in the rhythm and play of ‘Moving to Santa Fe’ by Mary Morris, in which she enacts the farewell song of someone moving from an old home to a new one. In Morris’ case,...
13th November 2021
'She says she wants to be a queen in her own right'
Humour in poetry does not always soften the blow secreted within a poem. Michelle Peñaloza knows that a tiny grenade sits in the middle of ‘Doppelgänger’, a seemingly passing comment, but one full of...
6th November 2021
'I love you without knowing how or when this world will end'
Craig Santos Perez packs into this love sonnet, 'Love in a Time of Climate Change', echoes of many famous love poems, from Robert Browning’s 'How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)', to Shakespeare’s 'Sonnet ...
25th October 2021
'You see only what you want to see. Maybe you always did.'
The elegant irony of Elaine Equi’s lament - what the Germans, I am told, call, Weltmüdigkeit, (world-weariness) - in her poem ‘In an Unrelated’, about the very contemporary phenomenon of ‘the news cyc...
18th October 2021
'A song sparrow hit the window just as summer began'
Bruce Willard’s poem ‘Song Sparrow’ captures with such intimacy the interruption of the comforting rituals of time: seasons changing, children growing older, water under the bridge, the world continui...
11th October 2021
'wait on the chicken to know he gone and it take a while'
When historical figures become the subjects of poetry, there is a rich opportunity for transporting us into the emotional world of such people through the beauty of the imagination. The facts of Anarc...
8th October 2021
'It's all yours, this father you make each day'
The monk’s tonsure is intentional, a shaved bald spot as part of the rituals of sanctification, but here, in his poem, ‘Tonsure’, Young sees this hereditary marker as a complex sign of the things a ma...
27th September 2021
'We take on trust the dead are buried and gone'
Dorianne Laux is one of our treasured poets. Her elegant poems grow out of the familiar. 'Urn' is beautifully inventive in the way she connects the moment of uneasy childlike delight in the inexplicab...
20th September 2021
'Veiled, he's mysterious as a bride'
What haunts this loose sonnet by Carrie Green is loss, anticipated loss, but loss, nonetheless. Yet, what emerges is an elegant “pre-elegy”. A tender anthem to a father and to the sweetness he represe...
14th September 2021
'It takes three days to tow our brokenness across the state'
Jehanne Dubrow’s finely crafted sonnet, her own “simple machine”, reminds us so well of that moment, full of contradictory emotions, when the things we think are “unfailing”, fail us. She reflects on ...
6th September 2021
'No matter how wide the final margin, a lone ballot never counted so much'
It’s been some months since our last election, but it is always good to be reminded, in this poem by Kamilah Aisha Moon, of how precious and hard-won the right to vote and the act of voting are.
...
30th August 2021
'Lost in a foaming green crawl, I grew smaller than me'
For many of us who live in landlocked states, an encounter with the tumult and power of the sea can be a bracing encounter with nature. Here, in a poem I came across in a clever new anthology called R...
26th July 2021
'I went to the hospital to hear my heart beat in her various chambers'
There is nothing quite like the relief of good news from the doctors. Of course, it is a reminder of the bad news we eventually expect, the faith that the word “cure” demands of us. I have always enjo...
19th July 2021
'I want to kiss them as I hurt to be kissed'
Sasha Pimentel’s poem is a splendid example of the poetic device called the conceit, which refers to an extended metaphor, and of course, the image here is the violin. Yet the title of the poem is tak...
12th July 2021
'The truth is I love watching you trot away from me'
It is reassuring to know that other dog owners struggle with the strange way in which we project our humanity on animals and ignore the implications of such an “unnatural” act. Nikki Wallschlaeger’s n...
5th July 2021
'You are the most beautiful dark'
I heard Yona Harvey say in an interview that this loose Shakespearean (“the bard”) sonnet was written for her teenage daughter, which makes its deep, layered beauty a touching monument to ...
15th June 2021
'And when the owl stirred, a fine dust fell from its wings'
In many cultural traditions, an encounter with an owl at night is an ominous sign. But here, in a poem by recent Shelley Memorial Award winner, Arthur Sze, (first published in 1982), there ...
10th June 2021
'I hold my life above a sieve'
There is a long and ancient tradition of poetry as a form of prayer. Here, in a poem from his new collection of new and selected poems, The Naked Prince, South Carolinian poet Ben Greer brings to my m...
31st May 2021
'Moths sing of you from wherever moths go to sing'
Sometimes defining what we mean by love causes us to fumble around, until we find the right language, or, as in this case, the perfect lived image that captures it all. Tyree Daye does this here in hi...
28th May 2021
'Each bite an ordinary weapon we wield against the shrinking of mouths'
The insane birds in 'Almost Forty', by the always eloquent and emotionally generous poet Ada Limón, seem to be warning of the coming of winter, but it is time, really, and its passing, that they anthe...
17th May 2021
'Animals long believed gone crept down from trees'
Tracy K Smith, former poet laureate, has a wonderful way with strange and haunting images, that still manage to tell a resonant story. I think of the old story she tells here - how future generations ...
10th May 2021
'Watching the troubled people running and crying'
I have a memory of Lucille Clifton responding to a young poet who asked her how she managed to be a productive publishing poet despite having to raise six children, by saying, “I wrote shorter poems.”...
3rd May 2021
'I keep that scrap of paper in my pocket'
June Jordan died in 2002, an American child of Jamaican immigrants whose remarkable poetry is collected in The Essential June Jordan, a new collection published by Copper Canyon Press. This eloquent f...
26th April 2021
'Mama, with an axe, trudged tirelessly each day through deep snow'
Missouri poet Kitty Carpenter could have chosen any number of titles for her poem, a moving and difficult accounting of how the roles of parent and child change as a result of the passing of time; but...
20th April 2021
'Little one, it starts with a heart'
It must be one of the great mercies of life that time provides us with the magical capacity to turn memories of the complete alarm of caring for an infant child into a delightful bit of nostalgia. Adr...
12th April 2021
'Here every flower grows ragged and sideways and always beautiful'
I have heard so many poets say that they feel like outcasts, until they meet other outcasts and dreamers, people who seem to feel like them, and suddenly they feel affirmed in their difference, and, a...
5th April 2021
'Nothing moving but his quick beating heart'
José Alcantara’s poem, which appeared in the winter 2020 issue of Rattle, seems simple enough - a splendid and hopeful account of a familiar moment - a bird stunned by a collision with glass, held in ...
29th March 2021
'We go nowhere for weeks. We're stiff and silent in these rows'
Only 0.03 per cent of us end up doing jury duty each year. But we all carry an awareness that it can be us next. According to casino.org a quarter of American adults serve on jury duty at lea...
22nd March 2021
Kwame Dawes takes over as editor of American Life in Poetry
Award-winning poet, author, and editor Kwame Dawes has published his first weekly column as American Life in Poetry editor, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and University of Nebraska-Lincoln...
21st March 2021
'They whirl out the door, the blue sky a sudden surprise'
Pat Emile, who served as assistant editor to American Life in Poetry for over a decade, was described by past editor Ted Kooser as the “Jill-Of-All-Trades for this column”. I was fortunate enough to e...
15th March 2021
