Poetry Unbound

What do sandwiches, laundry, therapy, childhood homes, and forgiveness have to do with each other? Wo Chan weaves a poem that charts the many things a single day can hold.Wo Chan is a poet and drag artist who performs as The Illustrious Pearl. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (Nightboat Books, 2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Wo Chan’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A note from the Poetry Unbound team:We’ve updated the audio for our episode “Amanda Gunn — Ordinary Sugar.” This updated version includes an additional stanza initially omitted from the recording and additional reflection from Pádraig.How can russet potatoes be made to taste of sugar and caramel? By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds.Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is the author of Things I Didn’t Do with This Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Gunn is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard, where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Photo credit: Moon DuchinFind the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Amanda Gunn’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Old stories — of mythology or religion — have sometimes been depicted as having one narrative and one interpretation. Here, J. Estanislao Lopez takes on the voice of a character whose story ended in violence, inviting listeners to claim their agency as this character claims hers.J. Estanislao Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books, 2022). His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and Poetry Magazine, as well as the anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. Lopez received his MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer J. Estanislao Lopez’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, author of Rose Quartz, discusses the significance of the word 'blue' in poetry, resilience of indigenous language revitalization, navigating cultural dichotomies, embracing regret and longing, and the interplay of weight and levity in poetry.

In a poem that explores a story of a name, a story of a color, a story of a sound, a story of an identity, a the story of a person — we hear of ancestors, childhood innocences, exclusions, memories, sensualities, and the way that the dead are not always dead.Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe is the author of Rose Quartz. She is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Red Paint, and holds a double MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Yellow Medicine Review, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She lives in Tacoma, Washington.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Find the companion bonus episode in your feed, with Pádraig Ó Tuama in conversation with Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On one particular day, a poem places events alongside each other, the ordinariness of each event casting the other events into light and shade.Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: Poems (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Charif Shanahan’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why do we do the things we do when we’re young? Brenda Cárdenas recalls nights sneaking out of the house as a teenager, looking for highs, looking for company. “Why would you do that?” is the adult question throughout the poem. “Why wouldn’t I?” is a reply.Brenda Cárdenas is the author of the poetry collection Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023). Cárdena’s works include Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009), the chapbook Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors (Decentralized Publications, 2011), co-authored with her husband Roberto Harrison, and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, 2005). She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001). She has served as faculty for the CantoMundo writers’ retreat and as Milwaukee Poet Laureate. She currently teaches creative writing and Latinx literature at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Brenda Cárdenas’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

An item of clothing — the blouse of a grandmother — is praised for its artistry, is remembered for how it sits on the body. And then, having been lost, is remade, refined, and reimagined on a new body that recalls the bodies of women of previous generations.Nithy Kasa is a Dublin-based poet of Congolese origin. Published in poetry magazines such as Poetry Ireland Review and anthologies like Dedalus Press’s Writing Home: The New Irish Poets, her work can also be found in the archive of the University of Galway and University College Dublin special collections. Her debut collection of poetry, Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho (Doire Press, 2022), was listed among the top poetry books of 2022 by The Irish Times.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Nithy Kasa’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What might have been? A poet recalls flirtations and electric connections that could have led to a different life.Selina Nwulu is a writer of Nigerian heritage who is based in London. Her poetry and essays have been widely featured in a variety of journals, short films, and anthologies, including the critically-acclaimed anthology New Daughters of Africa. Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip, was published in 2015 by Burning Eye Books and is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. She has toured her poetry extensively, both internationally and throughout the U.K. in a number of cultural institutions. She has also been featured in Vogue, ES Magazine, i-D, and Blavity, among others. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, and Polish, and exhibited in Warsaw, New York, Dublin, and Glasgow. She was the Young Poet Laureate for London in 2015-16, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She was also a finalist for the 2021 U.K. Arts Award for Environmental Writing. A Little Resurrection is her debut full-length collection. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Selina Nwulu’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you had to make a self portrait of your daily morning routine through language and sensation, what would you include? John Lee Clark offers memories of a birthday through experiences the body holds.John Lee Clark is a DeafBlind poet, essayist, historian, translator, and an actor in the Protactile movement. He is the author of the poetry collection How to Communicate (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022) and the essay collection Where I Stand (Handtype Press, 2014). Clark is a 2021-2023 Bush Leadership Fellow, a core member of Protactile Language Interpreting National Education Center, and a research consultant with the Reciprocity Lab at the University of Chicago.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer John Lee Clark’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.