"What must you admit, really, to be free?"

“Because I should’ve wrote this years
ago, I’m crying. So what my slow
failure pass the years
  Make me be crying. So what
in Bethlehem I tried to push so
much against it, where the Wall is
checkpoint and weird. So what
  My lonelier, sadder blackeraches
kept from me a heard resonance with
the land thought against my body, so
what.
I arrived.”

From “Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking)” by Rickey Laurentiis. Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Read the full poem on Poets.org. 

“There’s nothing the plague dead did that we
didn’t do.”

—From Steve Bellin-Oka’s poem “[Tet]”

Bellin-Oka is the author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost (University of North Texas Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. A Tulsa Artist Fellow in poetry and translation, he is also a research fellow at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. Read and listen to a Q&A with Bellin-Oka about his Poem-a-Day curatorial approach.

#PoetryNearYou Pick of the Week

Celebrated poet Adrian Matejka, editor of Poetry magazine, joins poet Kyle Dargan for an in-depth conversation about his life and work on Thursday, December 7, at Hill Center DC (921 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE Washington, D.C.). Buy tickets here. (Sponsored)

Check out Graywolf Lab, a new media initiative launched by our programmatic partner, Graywolf Press, on the cusp of their fiftieth anniversary year (2024). Graywolf Lab is an online platform for interdisciplinary conversations and new writing. Each Lab starts by gathering artists for a roundtable discussion on a particular theme, with additional artists, writers, and thinkers providing solicited responses to the discussion.

The first installment of the Lab explores the theme of “time.” The first Lab roundtable features Kweku Abimbola, author of the poetry collection Saltwater Demands a Psalm (Graywolf Press, 2023), winner of the Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award, in conversation with other writers and artists. Learn more.