This poem moves me and impresses me with its sense of almost-but-not-quite arriving at connection. Everywhere I turn within the walls of this poem, I come face to face with human need and the world’s shortcomings in meeting that need. Mourning her mother, the speaker attempts throughout the poem to do a simple thing: light…

The days following the election have been dark indeed. People unhappy with the outcome fear for many Americans’ safety and freedoms. Supporters of the president-elect feel alienated and misunderstood. The nation’s unsettled tenor reminds me of that post-9/11 haze in which we stumbled through our days unsure of what would happen next. Except this time…

Tootling around on Twitter, I’ve come upon a delightful community of poets. Their hashtag is #micropoetry. What these writers have realized is that Twitter’s restriction of 140 characters can be a stimulating challenge to finding just the right words to express concisely an impression, an experience, a thought. Much micropoetry on Twitter seems to be…

“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” This beatitude has always puzzled me: what, I’ve wondered, does it mean to be “poor in spirit”? So I was drawn to Fleda Brown’s poem “Poverty of Spirit,” hoping it would elucidate the concept. What I found was a fascinating narrative: of the speaker letting a wagonload of gypsies…

The sounds in this poem! I love its compactness and humming—its slender shape on the page, just like a tower of hive boxes. Bookended by two phrases that particularly sing—“lit hum” and “known oak”—this poem concentrates its gaze on the compelling paradoxes alive in our world, visible and audible in those very phrases. The hive…

I’m in a plane ascending to 37,000 feet. How restless have I been this year? How easily distractible? Already on this flight, from the time of boarding the plane until now, I’ve jumped from e-mail to Facebook to FiveThirtyEight to Jane Hirshfield on Basho to Mishkan Hanefesh, Sanctuary of the Soul, the Reform movement’s new…

Whenever I first meet a long skinny poem, I ask myself: Why has the poet chosen these very brief lines for the poem’s shape? In Todd Davis’s “Nothing More,” the effect of these short lines is a sort of staccato: short phrases punched out in succession and often snapped by startling line breaks. Yet what…

We pass into this world at birth. We pass out of it at death. And in between: holiness and horrors. This is probably the largest of themes that a poet could take on, and in “Intercession: For My Daughter” Brett Foster wraps his mind and language around it with consummate craft. First, to keep us…

Grief is a state of being that almost defies articulation. When you’re in it, it consumes and seems present in everything. Marjorie Stelmach focuses the lens of this poem on small scenes from the natural world—frames at once ordinary and suffused with loss, as befits the claustrophobia of mourning. The speaker here admits to wanting…

I sometimes talk to friends who have died. Especially to friends who acted as spiritual guides for me during their lives here. I continue to ask their advice when I’m in distress or need guidance.  I believe there’s a very thin and permeable line between mortal life and eternal life. This is why Jeffery Harrison’s…