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
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. Do you ever talk out loud to yourself? Sometimes I do, like last night in my little kitchen, making batches of toffee. To make toffee you have to stir and stir and stir, which is good because I like slow repetitive motion that takes a long … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Shel Silverstein
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. This morning I pulled a little book off my poetry shelves that looked like the kind of book I used to search through as a teenager, full of poems and aphorisms and quotes about how to live. Where this book came from I don’t know, but … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Emily Dickinson
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. When we were little we weren’t supposed to swim for an hour after we ate, because if we did, cramps will seize you and you’ll sink to the bottom and drown. Or something like that. And when we got drunk or high we were killing off … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Ursula K. Le Guin
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. On the way back from a long jog yesterday I glimpsed this book in a little free library. The sight of it brought me straight back to childhood. The poet’s name used to mesmerize me, and so did the poem below, which I copied out as … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Omar Khayyam
My new poems + reflections podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. A friend in college loved the word bittersweet for the way it made him feel, full of a kind of happiness mixed with sorrow. As if he were missing something while it was still happening. The last time I saw this friend, years ago … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Andrea Gibson
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
