Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s delicious and dexterous “Carne” begins with these lines: “I've eaten pork from / pernil to chuletas to chitterlings.” And just in case you were wondering — and even if you’re not — the speaker goes on to list much more of the seafood, poultry, and animal parts that have been consumed and how they were cooked. Lest you think this poem is simply a meat-eater’s manifesto, savor its final turn towards what else the speaker is really hungry for. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s first collection of poetry, The Strange House Testifies, was published by Bilingual Review Press. Her second collection, Beasts Behave in Foreign Land, received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Prize. She is a Dodge Poet, a CantoMundo Fellow, and holds an MFA in poetry from NYU. She works as a high school English teacher in New Jersey. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Loving in the face of violence, danger, and distress is an act of defiance, as demonstrated in Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s achingly beautiful poem “Dukka”.  The Palestinian American writer spotlights seven aspects of love in action — between father and newborn, for example, a journalist and her audience, a pair of intimates dining out. She shows us the “million ways to love” flowing through her community and cascading through generations, centuries, millennia, as inexorable and constant as the ocean and as bright and surprising as a rare meteor shower. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (The University of Akron Press, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen Press), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention of the 2018 Arab American Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, and Letters from the Interior, finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rachel Mann’s “#TDOR” manages to turn a depiction of one side of a conversation about marking Trans Day of Remembrance into a poem that is both empathic and uncompromising. Mann captures the verbal stammers and stumbles of the well-meaning but leaves us to reckon whether the words land as mirror, mockery, or cry for action. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Rachel Mann is a priest, writer, and broadcaster. She is the author of 13 books, including her debut poetry collection, A Kingdom of Love, and the acclaimed nonfiction, Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory, and God. She is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Manchester Writing School and broadcasts regularly, including as a contributor to Thought For The Day. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sanah Ahsan’s evocative “Ramadan’s Greeting” brings us into the thoughts and experiences of a person observing the holiest month in Islam. In nine brief couplets, the poet deftly directs our attention towards some of the rich contrasts that emerge at this time — between light and dark, desire and abstinence, self and community — as well as the abiding satisfactions and joys. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Sanah Ahsan is a poet, liberation psychologist, and educator. Sanah’s work plays in the wild terrain of woundedness, the sacred landscapes of falling apart, centering compassion and embracing each other's madness. Their work draws on therapeutics, psychospirituality, embodiment, and poetics as life-affirming practices. Some of Sanah’s media work includes writing for The Guardian, delivering a TEDx Talk, and presenting a Channel 4 documentary on the overmedicalization of people’s distress. Sanah is working on a nonfiction book about the politics of distress, and society’s relationship with unruly emotions. As a poet, Sanah won the Out-Spoken Poetry Performance Prize and has been shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The White Review Poetry Prize, and Bridport Poetry Prize. Sanah’s debut poetry collection, I cannot be good until you say it, is a meditation on Islam, queerness, and goodness. It was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection and Polari Prize, and selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“O come, in any way you want” is the first line in Kevin Hart’s marvelous, mystical “Prayer”. So come to this poem — whether for its deliciously sensual language (“bouts of rain”, “wind that wraps”, “raw and ragged smells / [o]f gumleaves”, and more), its air of mystery, or its unabashed aching for a “you” — and then linger for a while. Stay with it, or let it stay with you, and see what emerges.   

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Kevin Hart's most recent collections of poetry are Firefly (Pitt St. Poetry, 2026) and Carnets (Cascade, 2025). Other collections include Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (Notre Dame UP, 2015) and Barefoot (Notre Dame UP, 2018). A collection of new selected poems, 101 Poems, is forthcoming from Pitt St. Poetry. He teaches at Duke University in Durham, NC. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Too many of us left high school thinking that a poem could be taken seriously only if it was difficult to understand, subdued in its use of rhyme and alliteration, and addressed lofty topics. Harryette Mullen’s saucy, suggestive “LVTOFU” bulldozes through convention, all the while revelling in its own rhythms, references, and humor.   

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Harryette Mullen is the author of eight books of poetry, including Urban Tumbleweed, Recyclopedia, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is there to say or do when the life of a loved one has been upended and devastated? Stewart Henderson’s poem “How To Speak Love In A Storm?” offers a tender masterclass in how you can accompany someone — or even just yourself — through a time of tumult and pain. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Stewart Henderson is a Liverpool-born, best-selling poet, song lyricist, and award-winning broadcaster. He has published over a dozen poetry collections, including A Poet’s Notebook: with new poems, obviously (2018), Urban Angel (2000), and Assembled in Britain (1986). Henderson has also authored three volumes of poetry for children, with poems from those books included on the UK National Education Curriculum. He hosted the program Questions, Questions on BBC Radio 4 for eight years. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dante Micheaux’s rich and rollicking poem “Theologies for Korah” is written on the occasion of an infant’s baptism, but it’s anything but baby talk or bland instruction. Religious figures, rites, and symbols are proffered, not as liturgy or lore to be swallowed whole, eyes shut, but as people, stories, and ideas that cry out to be seen, played with, and engaged with.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus, which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd. His poems and translations have appeared in African American Review, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Literary Imagination, Poem­-A-Day, Poetry, and Tongue, among other journals and anthologies. Micheaux’s other honors include the Oscar Wilde Award, an Amy Clampitt Residency, the Ambit Prize, and a fellowship from The New York Times Foundation. He is a Fellow and Artistic Director at Cave Canem Foundation. Micheaux’s most recent work is the libretto, Sky in a Small Cage.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“How could there be a war in this city?” is the plaintive question that starts Oksana Makysymchuk’s “Arguments for Peace”. Like ours, the world of her poem holds both the “goodness of the universe” and “a foreign leader / warning of invasion”. She offers no pat answers for what to do in the face of conflict — just a dizzying sense of disbelief and the deep desire to hold tight to the people and life around us.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and translator. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Armen Davoudian’s casually intimate poem “Coming Out of the Shower”,  mother and son perform their morning routines in the small, shared space of their household’s only bathroom. She chats and puts on her makeup, while he showers and uses her shampoo and robe — oh what rhythm, affection, and ease are to be seen in this dance they both know so well.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Armen Davoudian has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry Magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and currently lives in California.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Some religions and some people have very specific ideas about “grace”, and that includes poet Orlando Ricardo Menes. In the carefully constructed “Grace”, he manages to both demystify and remystify what grace is, leaving us with the possibility that at any moment or no moment it could pour down and quench us all. Intrigued? Confused? Give this episode a listen.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Orlando Ricardo Menes teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor of English. He is also the author of several other works of poetry, including Memoria, Fetish, and Heresies. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.