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In this Books Are Magic event, Andrés Cerpa reads from his third collection, The Palace (Alice James Books, 2025), and talks about the importance of myth in poetry in a conversation with Iain Haley Pollock. Cerpa’s collection is featured in Page One in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ilya Kaminsky begins his poem “Psalm for the Slightly Tilted,” which was published this week in the New Yorker, with the lines: “This is not / a good year. / But it has / witnesses.” In this first month of the new year, compose a poem that begins with “This is a ____ year,” or perhaps “This is not a ____ year.” In Kaminsky’s poem, he explores protest, revolution, and resistance, deploying imagery of things that are slightly askew: a question mark, bent spoons, off-rhythm chants, and people leaning and lopsided. Think of how you would characterize the year based on these first weeks, considering what’s happening in your own life, and in political and global events. What sort of imagery might characterize the sentiments or mood of this month?
“Look up from your own desperation and walk outside. No matter the weather, be outdoors each day. It will help you.” —Andrés Cerpa, author of The Palace
The author of Cord Swell (Norton, 2025) reflects on offering reverence to ordinary objects in poetry.
In this video, fourteen Black poets from ten different countries read in multiple languages and in translation for this 2024 Furious Flower Poetry Center virtual event hosted by Gbenga Adesina, who is featured in “New Ways of Seeing: Our Twenty-First Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2025 reading hosted by the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Diana Arterian reads from Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press, 2025), Frannie Lindsay reads from The Snow’s Wife (CavanKerry Press, 2020), and Ariel Yelen reads from I Was Working (Princeton University Press, 2024).
In this 2024 LanguageBack Retreat Reading hosted by Indigenous Nations Poets, Kalehua Kim reads her poem “Mystique.” Kim, author of Mele (Trio House Press, 2025), is featured in “New Ways of Seeing: Our Twenty-First Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to / anymore, maybe my gut— // maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.” In “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” by Renée Nicole Good, a poet and mother who was fatally shot by an ICE agent earlier this month, the speaker contemplates a struggle between science and faith. Good won a 2020 prize from the Academy of American Poets for the poem, and guest judge Rajiv Mohabir spoke about what resonates with him in a recent Newsweek article: “What does it mean to define something until there is no wonder left? The poem asks me. The speaker in the poem has no answers, just experiences that illuminate the tensions that arise when trying to reconcile wonder against brutality.” Write a poem that is situated between the opposing tensions of wonder and brutality. Is there a point at which definition and description are overwhelming?
“Advice for poets should be poems.” —Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World
The author of Cord Swell (Norton, 2025) considers how memory can be mined for particular phrases and pronunciations to guide poetry.
