Poetry Unbound

A memory from childhood is viewed through the lens of the Malaysian poetic form of pantoum. New things emerge when lines break and reform with new associations.Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a 2022 recipient of a Tin House Next Book residency, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship Award at MacDowell. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Literary Hub, them, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, The Maine Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. For more information, visit kaybarrett.net or find them on social media at @brownroundboi.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Kay Ulanday Barrett’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 could put a lock of your hair under a microscope, what would it contain? DNA certainly, but here in dg nanouk okpik’s poem, the hair also contains memory, smell, location, disease, dreams, and medicine.dg nanouk okpik is Iñupiat-Inuit from Alaska. Her first book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), won the American Book Award and May Sarton Award. okpik was long-listed for the PEN American Award for Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022). She is a Lannan Fellow with the Institute of American Indian Arts. okpik resides in Santa Fe, NM.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer dg nanouk okpik’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.

Pádraig reflects on the transformative force of poetry, and Krista joins with an invitation to pay tribute to the ongoing work of Poetry Unbound.Make a gift and learn more at onbeing.org/LoveUs. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A social worker holds a group for teenagers at a school. They only half pay attention to him. Then something happens, and they pay attention to each other.Benjamin Gucciardi was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His first book, West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021), chosen by Elena Passarello as the winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in Oakland, California through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Gucciardi’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.

Have you ever had a private moment — perhaps in the middle of the night — in a large city? When it just seems like it’s you and the great dreaming metropolis? Rowan Ricardo Phillips brings us into a memory he can’t forget, complete with a Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack.Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Heaven (2015), Living Weapon (2020), and the forthcoming Silver (2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new, forthcoming edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (Picador, 2019). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Whiting Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the president of the board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic. Phillips received his doctoral degree in English literature from Brown University.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Rowan Ricardo Phillips’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.

In a poem of strict rhymes and old forms, Alexander Posey (1873-1908), a poet of the Creek Nation, poses challenges to pomposity.Alexander Posey was a poet, editor, and satirist born in 1873 in the Creek Nation. Posey was the publisher of the first Indian-published daily newspaper, the Eufaula Indian Journal.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Alexander Posey’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.

In a church there are liturgies and prayers and statues. But in José Olivarez’s poem, there are more urgent things taking place, things that have “no time to wait.”José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants.  He is the author of Promises of Gold, a collection of poems. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhereFind the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer José Olivarez’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.

Friendships deserve praise songs, and here’s a praise song — an ode — to friends that have crossed continents for each other, and would go further if needed.Sudanese by way of D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, and Home Is Not a Country, and is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, the Arab American Book Award, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she is also the recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, The Atlantic, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, among others.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Safia Elhillo’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.

Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama is back on Monday, May 22. Featured poets in this season include Selina Nwulu, Wo Chan, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mark Turcotte, and many more. New episodes released every Monday and Friday through July 28.Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever you listen. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Friends, we are awakening your Poetry Unbound feed for a moment to share this episode from the big, beautiful new season of On Being. And Pádraig’s here with a quick hello and a glimpse of what more On Being conversations await you in coming months. You won’t want to miss — subscribe now in the On Being feed and catch each episode as it drops, every Thursday. And now…An electric conversation with Ada Limón's wisdom and her poetry — a refreshing, full-body experience of how this way with words and sound and silence teaches us about being human at all times, but especially now. With an unexpected and exuberant mix of gravity and laughter — laughter of delight, and of blessed relief — this conversation holds not only what we have traversed these last years, but how we live forward. It unfolded at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis, in collaboration with Northrop at the University of Minnesota and Ada Limón's publisher, Milkweed Editions.Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.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.