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.   

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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.

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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. 

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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.  

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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.

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“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.  

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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.

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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.  

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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.

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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.  

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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.

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In fewer than two dozen lines, Cyrus Cassells’s poem “Jasmine” offers readers a multisensory, cinematic immersion into late spring life in Rome. Not only is the “sweet, steady broadcast” of jasmine ever-present amid “the joyous braiding of sun and rain”, but there’s also Daria, a “crone-glorious” neighbor, with a story about her romance with the gallant Galliano. It’s la dolce vita, without overindulgence or artifice. 

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Cyrus Cassells, former poet laureate of Texas, is the author of 11 books of poetry, including Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (2024), The World That the Shooter Left Us (2022), and More Than Watchmen at Daybreak (2020). Cassells’s honors include the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, a National Poetry Series selection, two NEA grants, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.

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W.S. Merwin’s “For The Anniversary of My Death” is a slim, precise poem — just 13 lines made up of 84 words — about the very weightiest of subjects, one’s future death. With it, Merwin has crafted an elegant vessel, a small and sturdy container to hold some of life’s big questions, uncertainties, and feelings. Are you ready to gaze at it, grasp it, sit with it? And as you contemplate death, he gently reminds, remain here — where there’s rain, birdsong, and life right in front of you.  

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and attended Princeton University on a scholarship. He worked as a tutor and freelance translator before publishing his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus (1952), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, selected by W.H. Auden. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice — for The Carrier of Ladders (1971)  and for The Shadow of Sirius (2008). In 2005, he won the National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems. Merwin also served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and two terms as the U.S. poet laureate, among numerous other awards and honors. He died in 2019 at his home on the island of Maui, Hawaii, at the age of 91.  

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Words can’t quite fully capture the activity, oddity, and awe that is everywhere around us, but poet Kimberly Blaeser makes a gorgeous attempt in her poem “my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers.” The three stanzas overflow with an exuberance of colorful creatures — from checked loons and flitting mayflies to a “blissful beaver” and a “red squirrel swimming (yes! swimming)” — and with love — love of the natural world, of looking, of language, of the language of looking, and of being present for such everyday wonders. 

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Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. Her poetry collections include Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member.

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Marie Howe’s poetry shimmers with the keen attention she pays to language: the language of the body (both the human body and “the beautiful body of the world”), of people’s everyday speech, and of religious myth. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Marie, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. Marie reads several poems, and together, they discuss Mary Magdalene as complex everywoman, the “eternal energy” of dead loved ones that fills Marie’s life and work, and her current efforts to listen to what the Earth is saying to us.    

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Marie Howe is the former Poet Laureate of New York and the author of five collections of poetry, including Magdalene, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and What the Living Do. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2025 New and Selected Poems, published in the US by W .W. Norton. The same book is published in the UK as What the Earth Seemed to Say by Bloodaxe Books. 

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“Spending time in hell is not my idea of something that one should do,” says poet Lorna Goodison, yet she immersed herself there for years to create her extraordinary modern Jamaican translation of Dante’s Inferno. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Lorna, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. She reads from her work, and together, they discuss Lorna’s inspiration for her underworld undertaking, how she found her Virgil, and why she calls The Inferno “bitter, necessary medicine for now.”   

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Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017. In 2018, she received a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

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