My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. Paco! Our new little guy, elegant, lively and full of curiosity and affection. An athlete too — no matter how fast we run the leash never slackens, and every dash through the living room involves catlike leaps on and off the couch. Everything interests him, but when … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Stephen Cushman
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. I’m no dancer but I love to dance anyway. So many memories of dancing. A ballet studio on the second floor of a frame house: First position. Second position. Plie. Arabesque. Releve. The Alibi: a bar in Vermont, my best friend and I waiting in the entryway … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. Four years ago my family and I flew to DC to protest cruelty, bigotry, and oppression. My memories of that day, the people I met, the signs I saw, the peaceful and profound determination I witnessed, have stayed with me through the years and the marches since. … Continue reading Poem of the Week (excerpt), by Amanda Gorman
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. When someone in my family almost but doesn’t triumph at something, one of us might say But you didn’t, a phrase that goes back long ago to our friend Kareem, who almost but didn’t score an incredible soccer goal, and his mother who, after the fourth … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Yalie Kamara
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. Yesterday I listened to a news commentator tell me that in a few weeks things will have died down and we’d be “back to normal.” Really? Normal used to mean the legal enslavement of Black people. Normal, in my grandmother’s day, meant she couldn’t vote. Normal, when … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Shilpa Kamat
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. As a kid I used to wake up at dawn and walk down the road to a small concrete ledge over a watering hole. There were never any cars, and I used to sit on the ledge and watch the sun come up over the valley. … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Elizabeth Coatsworth
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. A couple of days ago I went looking in my files for a long poem by Li-Young Lee, two lines of which were haunting me. The poem popped up in a journal from twenty years ago, a journal I have no memory of keeping, and I … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Olav Hauge
Ohhhhh I am so behind with my 2020 mini-book reviews. My lofty goal of a round-up review each month entirely fell by the wayside, along with so much else in this overwhelming year. Let me partially remedy that right this minute with mini-book reviews of books I read in the last few months, written on … Continue reading Mini-book reviews
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. Look at my mother holding my baby sister in this old photo, how impossibly young and unafraid she looks. I used to carry my babies everywhere like that too, the way every parent does. Cradled in my arms, or with their legs straddling my hip. Hoisted … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Kim Addonizio
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. You’re being pulled, but from what and toward what? Everything is in transition. What has your life meant, and what will it mean? Words from my journal earlier this morning. Questions without answers, written by me to a woman who appeared this morning as I carried … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Charles Tomlinson
Telling all sides of the parenting story
Waking Up to Your Dreams
On James Baldwin and Diverse Literature
Putting those recalcitrant toddler cancer cells to bed...
your own PDK for writing
a collection of beautiful words.....
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
"drink from the well of your self and begin again" ~charles bukowski
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Thoughts on the world around me
the literary asylum
