Of Poetry Podcast

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, Google, and streaming

Read: Neutral Spaces, for more of Tom Snarsky’s poetry

Purchase: Reclaimed Water (Ornithopter Press, 2023)

Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him @tomsnarsky on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky, and you can find the reading series he coordinates @night_light_poems_ on Instagram and @nightlightpoems on Twitter. If you’re a poet, he would love to hear from you!

Further/Recommended Reading:

The Minison

The Minison Project

C.T. Salazar

Noelle Kocot’s Ascent of the Mothers (Wave Books, 2023)

Jon Anderson’s The Inner Gate

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Read: April 2020

Purchase: For Today (LSU Press, 2024)

Carolyn Hembree‘s third poetry collection, For Today, is forthcoming from LSU Press. She is also the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine. 

Recommended Reading:

Jennifer Shaw’s visual art series Flood State

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter (novella on the 1918 flu pandemic)

Inger Christensen’s alphabet, translated Susanna Nied

Spring and All (facsimile edition with introduction by C.D. Wright) by William Carlos Williams

[By the road to the contagious hospital] by William Carlos Williams

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

“An Anatomy of the Long Poem” by Rachel Zucker

Of Being Numerous (excerpt) by George Oppen

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Read: “Dear Memphis,” at Terrain.org

Purchase: Dear Memphis (River River Books, 2023)

Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee whose writing explores diasporic living. Dear Memphis, their debut collection of poems, will be published by River River Books in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and many other journals. They have received material support from City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House and finalist commendations from the Adrienne Rich Award, the Pink Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice.

Further Reading:

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

Alicia Ostriker

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Read: “Here is a Sea We Cannot Call Sea” in Scalawag

Purchase: The Understudy’s Handbook (WWPH, 2020).

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

Further Reading:

Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems

Taylor Byas, “THE POETICS OF PERFORMANCE IN STEVEN LEYVA’S THE UNDERSTUDY’S HANDBOOK“

The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair, 2021)

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Read: “Self Portrait with Arithmetic,” “Self-Portrait Without Wings,” and “Self-Portrait as Smaller Moon” at The Brooklyn Quarterly

Purchase: Flutter, Kick by Anna V. Q. Ross (Red Hen Press, 2022)

Anna V.Q. Ross‘s previous collections include If a Storm (Anhinga Press, winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry); Figuring (Bull City Press); and Hawk Weather (winner the New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Society). 

A recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Fulbright Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center, her recent work appears in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Nation, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor for Salamander Magazine and teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative. Anna lives with her family in Dorchester, where she runs the poetry and music series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.

Reading/Viewing Recommendations:

Muriel Rukeyser’s (“I lived in the first century of world wars”)

Visual art by Shelly Julian Bunde (“She Left For Good One Time But Came Back”)

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Read: “Must Learn Neither,” at Poetry Daily

Purchase: An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023)

Lauren Mukamal Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate, is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Reading/Viewing Recommendations:

Agnes Martin

Vija Celmins

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Read: “My Devices, My” at Cagibi and excerpt from Bullet Points at Parhelion Review.

Purchase: Bullet Points (River River Books, 2023)

Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet, essayist, and attorney living in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared or will appear in Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, I-70 Review, Cagibi, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere.

Reading Recommendation:

Hart Crane, Linda Hull, Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know

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Purchase: Wiregrass and Other Poems by Moira J. Saucer and Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion by Catherine Rockwood

Moira J Saucer is a disabled poet living in the Alabama Wiregrass. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her worked has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada including Black Bough Poetry Freedom- Rapture anthology, Visual Verse, Fly on the Wall Press, Ice Floe Press, Mooky Chick, Floodlight Editions, and Fevers of the Mind Poets of 2020.

Catherine Rockwood is a staff member of Reckoning Magazine and a reviewer for Strange Horizons. She has a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, and many remaining questions about everything.

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Purchase: Maker of Heaven & at Belle Point Press

Jason Myers is the author of Maker of Heaven & (Belle Point Press, 2023) and A Place for the Genuine (Eerdmans, 2024). Myers is a National Poetry Series finalist and has published poetry and essays in The Believer, Image, Kenyon Review, Orion, The Paris Review, and numerous other magazines. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best New Poets and was introduced by Campbell McGrath as part of American Poet‘s Emerging Poets feature. He is co-Executive Director of EcoTheo Collective and Editor-in-Chief of EcoTheo Review. An Episcopal priest, He lives with his wife, Allison Grace Myers, and their son Robinson in Texas.

More reading recommended from this episode: Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems, Meik Wiking’s The Little Book of Hygge