Even though Palestinian-American Fady Joudah’s poem is sparingly titled “[...],” an ellipsis surrounded by brackets, this work itself is psychologically dense. Through crisp lines and language, it wrestles with the nature of human ambivalence — about things like fear, desire, disaster, liberty — and it finds certainty only in the shaky universal ground of that ambivalence.

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published five other collections of poems, including Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and children, where he works as a physician in internal medicine.

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We’re pleased to offer Fady Joudah’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

Benjamin Zephaniah’s urgent, imperative “To Michael Menson” was written when he was a poet in residence at a human rights barrister in England. His poem resonates with his repeated calls for justice for a murdered Black musician — not a justice that is gullible, impotent, or hopeless but one that is clear-eyed, collaborative, and mighty.

Benjamin Zephaniah was born and raised in Birmingham, England. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including City Psalms, Propa Propaganda, and Too Black, Too Strong. In 2000, he was poet in residence for the chambers of human rights barrister Michael Mansfield, where he worked on numerous cases, including the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Zephaniah appeared on the TV show Peaky Blinders and is also known for his poetry books for children.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

Carmen Giménez’s poem “Ars Poetica” is a stunning waterfall of words, a torrent of dozens of short statements that begin with “I” or “I’m.” As you listen to them, let an answering cascade of questions fill up your mind. What does this series of confessions reveal to you about poetry? The poet? And yourself?

Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry, and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize in 2020. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she served as the publisher of Noemi Press for 20 years. She is the Publisher and Executive Director of Graywolf Press.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Carmen Giménez’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

Rick Barot’s poem “The Singing” takes place in the humdrum, relatable setting of the waiting room at a car dealership. But the unexpected occurs when one woman’s soft humming builds into strange, full-throated singing. Curiosity, wonder, anger, and dread spill over, forcing you to face the same dilemma as the narrator: What can you do when reality defies your control?

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Barot teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and is the director of the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020, and his most recent collection is Moving the Bones.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Rick Barot’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

“You would’ve made a lousy nun.” The narrator of Diannely Antigua’s “Another Poem about God, but Really It’s about Me” overhears these words, and they jolt her into contrasting her life experience with the limited archetypes offered by her church — good daughter, good sister, holy woman, whore. Which of these has she been? Where does her devotion lie? And what virtue can she claim?

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican-American poet and educator who was born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection, Ugly Music, won a 2020 Whiting Award and the Pamet River Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to study in Florence, Italy. She was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in the Best of the Net Anthology and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She currently serves as the poet laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and is the host of the podcast Bread & Poetry. Her most recent poetry collection is Good Monster.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Diannely Antigua’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

Don McKay’s poem “Neanderthal Dig” begins with the discovery of an ancient, child-sized skeleton placed on the wing of a swan and then takes flight, showing us how love and death are riddled with paradoxes — mixing the earthbound and the sacred, the personal and the universal, the time-stamped and the never ending.

Don McKay is the multi-award-winning author of multiple books of poetry, including Lurch, Paradoxides, Strike/Slip (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize), and Camber: Selected Poems (finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year). McKay has taught poetry in universities across Canada. He currently lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Don McKay’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

When dictatorial leaders use talk of peace as a smokescreen to conceal their plans for war and destruction, what are the people to do? Believe in a vision of peace and freedom that is muscular, sturdy, and protective — and pray that it holds, as Ernesto Cardenal does in his poem “Give Ear to My Words (Psalm 5),” translated by Jonathan Cohen.

Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020) was a Catholic priest and poet who was born in Nicaragua. From 1979 to 1988, he served as the Minister of Culture there. Cardenal was the author of several volumes of poetry, including Pluriverse, Zero Hour, Apocalypse, and In Cuba.

Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and a scholar of inter-American literature. He has translated Ernesto Cardenal, Enrique Lihn, Pedro Mir, and Roque Dalton, among others, and his own poems and essays have been widely published. He is the author of pioneering critical works on Pablo Neruda and Muna Lee.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Jonathan Cohen’s translation of Ernesto Cardenal’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

Many people say their experience of time changes after they have children, a phenomenon that Diego Báez captures in “Inheritance.” In this poem, a past, present, and future starring the same child shift ceaselessly in a parent’s mind, like photos flipped through in an album, dots placed on a timeline, moments that one wishes they could build monuments for.

Diego Báez, is a writer and educator in Chicago, where he teaches at the City Colleges of Chicago. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University - Newark. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Báez’s work has been published in Freeman's, The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, The Thing Itself Journal, Number Eleven Magazine, and Hobart. His poetry has appeared in Luna Luna, la fovea, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves as a Director of the Board for the National Book Critics Circle and the International David Foster Wallace Society. Báez was an inaugural fellow at CantoMundo in 2010. Yaguareté White, published in 2024 by The University of Arizona Press, is his debut poetry collection.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Diego Báez’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.