“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

This book includes the poetry by and interviews with : Jennifer K. Dick, Laura Mullen, Jon Woodward, Rae Armantrout, Sabrina Orah Mark, Claudia Rankine, Christina Hawkey,Tomaž Šalamun, Christine Hume, Rosemarie Waldrop, Srinkath Reddy, Mark Levine, Karen Volkman, Allen Grossman, Paul Fattaruso, Dara Wier, Mark Yakich, Mary Leader, Michelle Robinson, Paul Auster, Sawako Nakayasu, Carla Harryman, Ben Lerner, and Aaron Kunin.

In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us. As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other. Oka’s speakers mourn, labor, argue, digress, avenge, and fail, but they do not retreat. Born of conflicts public and private, this collection is for anyone interested in what it means to engage the multitudes within ourselves.

Captivating poems and visual art seek to bring comfort and solidarity to anyone living with Bipolar Disorder. In this remarkable debut, Shira Erlichman pens a love letter to Lithium, her medication for Bipolar Disorder. With inventiveness, compassion, and humor, she thrusts us into a world of unconventional praise. From an unexpected encounter with her grandmother’s ghost, to a bubble bath with Bjӧrk, to her plumber’s confession that he, too, has Bipolar, Erlichman buoyantly topples stigma against the mentally ill. These are necessary odes to self-acceptance, resilience, and the jagged path toward healing. With startling language, and accompanied by her bold drawings and collages, she gives us a sparkling, original view into what makes us human.

Haiku poems about the natural world and the seasons are well known, but many poets have also used the haiku genre to capture the fleeting human experience.

This is a book of thought-provoking conversant poetry speaking about how to 'deal with,' 'distance yourself,' and/or 'break away,' from negative-minded people who don't mean you well in life, and/or who prefer to live their lives with confusion, stupidity, ignorance, and ungodliness. Sadly, there are daughters & sons who've fallen victim to 'emotional blackmail' by a loved one who haven't wrestled nor confronted their own past demons for so long that its toll has become painfully burdensome. And no matter what you say or do, it's never enough, which is why it is so critical to "Preserve Your Sanity At All Cost," to increase the length of time of your existence on Earth to take care of self and your family! In this book you'll find that you (or someone else you know) are not alone when experiencing negative situations of any kind, which is why this subject of maintaining one's own sanity should be addressed publicly without candy-coating the truthfulness about negative human behavior.

Chaucer.--The old dramatists [Chapman and Ford].--The plays of Thomas Middleton.--Song-writing.