In the third episode, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge invites listeners to observe a plant and receive its messages. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Berssenbrugge’s prompt: Choose a plant and observe it with care for five minutes and inte...
Jun 30, 2025•14 min•Ep. 377
In the second episode, Edward Salem invites listeners to find what’s beyond “so what.” _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Salem’s prompt: Write a poem that responds to the question, “What is beyond so what?” You can replace “so wha...
Jun 23, 2025•13 min•Ep. 376
In the first episode, Gabrielle Calvocoressi invites listeners to make a web. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly , a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Calvocoressi’s prompt: Make a web. Use whatever form of web making comes naturally to your orb-weaving self. Could yo...
Jun 16, 2025•13 min•Ep. 376
This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kiki Petrosino, who has published five elegant and remarkable books, all with Sarabande, including the memoir Bright (2022) and the poetry collection White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020). Petrosino speaks about crestfallenness and her new essay in the October issue of Poetry , “On Crestfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor,” which appeared as part of the Hard Feelings series. She also talks about having her mother join her for her research, teaching acro...
Oct 24, 2023•38 min•Ep. 373
This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kimiko Hahn, who won the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and who is featured in the October 2023 issue of Poetry . Hahn talks about how her work has changed over the years, including her current love of form, and how she’s been mentoring her younger self while putting together her forthcoming new and selected, The Ghost Forest (W.W. Norton). She also discusses being wrong about Elizabeth Bishop, not getting an MFA, and what it was ...
Oct 10, 2023•56 min•Ep. 372
This week, Cindy Juyong Ok talks with Cathy Park Hong, who has published three volumes of poetry and the collection of essays Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hong introduces us to a new selection from “Spring and All,” featured in the September 2023 issue of Poetry . She discusses how feeling like a “shit mom” during the early days of the pandemic has influenced her new writing, as did the work of other artists and writers who address “f...
Sep 26, 2023•42 min•Ep. 371
On this week’s episode, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about the life and work of the renowned Palestinian poet and writer Zakaria Mohammed. Born in Nablus, Palestine, Mohammed was a freelance journalist, editor, and poet who authored nine volumes of poetry. In 1994, after twenty-five years in exile, he returned to his homeland to live in Ramallah where he recently died at the age of seventy-three. Ok and Khalaf Tuffaha discuss Mohammed’s rebellio...
Sep 12, 2023•47 min•Ep. 370
This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kevin Young, who has authored or edited over twenty books including the poetry collection Stones (Knopf, 2021) and the nonfiction investigation Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017 ) . In addition to directing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Young is also the poetry editor at the New Yorker, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the conversation toda...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 369
This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with Richie Hofmann, whose latest book is A Hundred Lovers (Knopf, 2022), about the ancient tale of Hermias of Iasos which informs Hofmann’s poem “Dolphin.” The poem appears in the July/August issue of Poetry alongside “Breed Me,” and we’ll hear both on today’s episode. Hofmann and Ok reveal they are both “Cavafy heads,” and Hofmann discusses the influence of Robert Mapplethorpe on his poems, as well as why lineation is one of the “erotic touchstones” of poetry....
Aug 15, 2023•52 min•Ep. 368
This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with torrin a. greathouse, a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist who is the author of the forthcoming DEED (Wesleyan University Press), as well as Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020). Ok and greathouse get into poetic forms—which they liken to open-source software—particularly the beloved “burning haibun” form that greathouse created and that she wrote about for Poetry ’s “Not Too Hard to Master” series. The essay appears in the July...
Aug 01, 2023•56 min•Ep. 368
This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Douglas Kearney, who joins from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Kearney is the author of eight books of poetry, prose, and libretti, and his poems are often highly distinctive both on and off the page. Today’s conversation begins with spite and Scrabble, which Kearney writes about in his new essay in the July/August issue of Poetry , a continuation of the “Hard Feelings” series. They also talk about the changing topographies in Kearney’s work, the “dintelligibility...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 366
This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Elisa Gabbert, who joins us from Providence, Rhode Island. Gabbert is the author of six, soon to be seven, collections of essays and poems, including Normal Distance (Soft Skull Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Any Person Is the Only Self (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Ok writes, “For Elisa, seemingly no field, no form, no fondness, is exempt from her thought or, lucky for us, her writing. She is a lover of surprising etymology and misunderstood quotes...
Jul 05, 2023•48 min•Ep. 365
This week, new host Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Omar Sakr, who joins us from Sydney, Australia. Sakr tends to the in between, writing prose and poetry, and moving between poetic and political urges, and through queerness and diasporic experience. On this episode, we spend time with a series from Sakr’s newest collection, Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023). The series, “On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” reflects on and challenges Canto XXVIII, in which Dante comes upon th...
Jun 20, 2023•45 min•Ep. 364
This week, new host Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Donika Kelly. The author of two poetry collections, The Renunciations and Bestiary, Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Rita Dove called The Renunciations , “poetry of the highest order,” and Nikki Finney, who selected Kelly’s first book for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, wrote, “ Bestiary ’s lesson is complicated and also simple. Love can be hunted down.” Using erasures or Greek myths, writing from terror and travel, Kelly nev...
Jun 06, 2023•42 min•Ep. 363
This week, Charif Shanahan speaks with Cynthia Cruz, who joins us from Berlin, Germany. Born on a US military base in Wiesbaden and raised in Northern California, she is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focuses on Hegel and madness. Cruz is the author of seven poetry collections, as well as two collections of critical work, including The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class . In the book, Cruz writes, “To be working-class in a middle-...
May 23, 2023•35 min•Ep. 362
This week, Charif Shanahan continues asking the Big Questions, this time with Brian Tierney, who joins us from Oakland, California. They get into poetry as a way to pursue truth, living in a time of ruin, and more. We hear poems from Tierney’s debut collection, Rise and Float (Milkweed Editions, 2022), as well as poems from the May issue of Poetry . In keeping true to Tierney’s complex poetics, this new work emerges from a world of dystopian exhaustion while also insisting on love....
May 16, 2023•47 min•Ep. 361
This week, Charif Shanahan asks Marie Howe the Big Questions about writing into the unknown, losing oneself in poems, spirituality, the ineffable, teaching and mentorship, and more. Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017), which imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape—hailing a cab, raising a child, listening to news on the radio. Howe also co-edited (with...
May 02, 2023•47 min•Ep. 360
This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from a Ruth Lilly Prize winner who’s worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975: CAConrad. The poet Hoa Nguyen writes of them: “A queer activist, a diviner, and a visionary ...
Apr 18, 2023•45 min•Ep. 359
This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from one of these winners, someone who’s been illuminating a way forward for poetry for over fifty years: Arthur Sze. Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He’s authored eleven books of poetry,...
Apr 04, 2023•52 min•Ep. 358
On this episode, Lindsay Garbutt speaks with Nam Le, whose debut book, the short story collection The Boat , was translated into fourteen languages and received over a dozen major awards. We hear poems from his much anticipated first poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem , out from Knopf this year. The book is incredibly polyvocal, unpredictable, and intimate, yet also politically scathing. Garbutt and Le get into the inherent violence of language and how slippage and ambiguity...
Mar 21, 2023•44 min•Ep. 357
This week, Holly Amos speaks with KB Brookins, a writer, cultural worker, and artist living in Austin, TX, and the author of the chapbook How to Identify Yourself with a Wound, as well as the forthcoming full-length collection Freedom House . Brookins talks about the power of insisting on their transness, getting to know the plants in their neighborhood, being a “career Texan,” and more. We also have the pleasure of hearing poems from Freedom House that appear in the March 2023 issue of Poetry ....
Mar 07, 2023•52 min•Ep. 356
This week, Holly Amos speaks with Joanna Klink, who joins us from Austin, Texas. Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields , and she shares some new poems that appear in the February 2023 issue of Poetry . If described directly, the poems feature the mundane, yet they carry a deep sense of unease. Amos states, “The unease is gorgeous, and the gorgeous is uneasy.” Speaking toward that uneasiness, Amos and Klink get into psychic longing, time and aging, attention a...
Feb 21, 2023•40 min•Ep. 355
This week, Adrian Matejka sits down with poet and guest editor of the magazine, Charif Shanahan, to talk about oneness, the shifting of identity, and centering love. Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Shanahan’s poems meditate on mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. Shanahan shares how a class he almost dropped with the poet Linda Gregg changed poetry for him forever, and he reads two poems ...
Feb 07, 2023•31 min•Ep. 354
For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do we refresh our writing habits and routines? How do poets sustain their writing practices? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poets and educators Stefania Gomez and Maggie Queeney. Stefania and Maggie both work in the Poetry Foundation library, and they share some of their inspirations, tips, challenges, and resources. Holly offers two writing prompts, and we hear advice on how to keep making via clips from CAConrad, Jor...
Jan 24, 2023•47 min•Ep. 353
For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do poets sustain their writing practices? Are there generative tips and tricks we can learn from them? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poet, writer, and dancer Tishani Doshi, whose essay in the December 2022 issue of Poetry is about shape or concrete poetry. Doshi lives in Tamil Nadu, India, and is joining us today from Abu Dhabi, where she is a New York University visiting associate professor. Doshi’s latest book of po...
Jan 10, 2023•48 min•Ep. 352
This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diné poet Tacey M. Atsitty. Atsitty’s debut full-length collection, Rain Scald , was published in 2018, and Arthur Sze described the book as filled with a poetry “where rain, expected to be nourishing, is also a torrent, burning with sensation.” Today, we’ll hear two new poems by Atsitty, “Things to Do with a Monster” and “Lady Birds’ Evening Meetings” from the December issue of Poetry . Atsitty’s new poems come out of her desire to create a bestiary of Diné m...
Dec 27, 2022•35 min•Ep. 351
This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diamond Forde, who joins us from Asheville, North Carolina, which she describes as a sort of homecoming. One of five recent recipients of the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body , is described as “an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother.” Today we’ll hear from a new series of poems by Forde, which appear in the December 2022 ...
Dec 13, 2022•40 min•Ep. 350
This week, Ashley M. Jones speaks with Marcus Wicker about a project he began early in the pandemic while looking for sources of calm in books and music. Many of these were space-influenced—OutKast’s album ATLiens , Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal”—and Wicker began exploring what an extraterrestrial who lands in Atlanta in 2020 would think of America and the way humans treat one another. We’ll hear two poems from this project, “Dear Mothership,” and “How did you learn to speak English?” w...
Nov 29, 2022•43 min•Ep. 349
On this week’s episode, Su Cho speaks with Tariq Luthun, a Palestinian writer and community organizer based in metro Detroit. Luthun is the author of How the Water Holds Me , out from Bull City Press in 2020, and we hear his poem, “I Want to Die,” from the November 2022 issue of Poetry . Cho and Luthun delight us with a brief Pokémon sing-along and discuss hiding bad grades as children in the Midwest, as well as the difficulty of finding joy in an apocalyptic world. Luthun also talks about writi...
Nov 16, 2022•36 min•Ep. 349
This week, Su Cho sits down with Taneum Bambrick to talk about two of her favorite things: poetry and intimacy. Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received , recently out from Copper Canyon Press, and Vantage . Their chapbook, Reservoir , was selected by Ocean Vuong for the Yemassee Chapbook Prize. Vuong wrote, “This is poetry that encompasses, that let's no one turn away.” That’s exactly how Cho felt reading Bambrick’s poems in the November 2022 issue of Poetry . Cho says, “Bambrick’s poems ...
Nov 02, 2022•41 min•Ep. 348
