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

November 29, 2023
Rickey Laurentiis

“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. 

more at poets.org
“Upon a first reading, the sharp, vivid images of Bitsui’s poems appear to have some connection to surrealism.”

—From “Emerging Poet: On Sherwin Bitsui” by Academy Chancellor Emeritus Arthur Sze 

Read more about Bitsui, including poems:

Triptych
Knives Whistle
Earth
more at poets.org

“When it’s time to grieve, when it’s time to celebrate, when it’s time to heal, when it’s time love, when it’s time to explain the unexplainable, we turn to poetry. And in the midst, we learn something about ourselves and others. Poetry helps us hold up a mirror to ourselves and helps us to see ourselves and the world in a clearer light.”

Read an interview with Jennifer Bartell Boykin, 2023 Poet Laureate Fellow and Poet Laureate of Columbia, South Carolina. Read poems by Bartell Boykin:

Louis Armstrong Plays for His Wife in Giza, 1961
Leaves Like Prayer

more at 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.

Don’t miss Gather in Poems, an end-of-year reading in the spirit of gratitude featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Kwame Dawes, Oliver de la Paz, Denice Frohman, Kimiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, John Keene, Dorianne Laux, Naomi Shihab Nye, Yasmine Seale, Yvette Siegert, and Afaa Michael Weaver. December 14, 2023 at 7 p.m. ET. Free and virtual; closed captioning available. Register here.

Sponsored Content
Watch Jubi Arriola-Headley read Ross Gay’s poem “Sorrow Is Not My Name.” This is the first of ten films in Read By Miami, a series produced by Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation with O, Miami Poetry Festival. Directed by Eric Felipe-Barkin.

#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.

Revisit last week’s Poem-a-Day selections with us on Poets.org:

November 19: “A Vision of the End” by Too-qua-stee
November 20: “What I Was Looking For” by Kathy Fagan
November 21: “A Marriage at Ancestral Hall in Sun Village” by Shelley Wong
November 22: “The Specious Present” by Catherine Barnett
November 23: “Bicuspid” by Clemonce Heard
November 24: “The Last Orgasm” by Tobias Wray
November 25: “To the Miscodeed” by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
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