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Good Letters

poetry

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September 2017

September 08, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Russian Bell”

In this stirring poem by Anya Silver, the bell becomes a blueprint. First, the bell...

September 01, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Psalm of Your Face”

“Lord, let…”: this is how nearly every sentence of Nicholas Samaras’s “The Psalm of Your...

August 2017

August 25, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Love’s Alchemy”

The first thing I’m drawn in by in Margaret Rabb’s “Love’s Alchemy” is the lusciousness...

August 18, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Fire Tower”

This summer is marked by smoke, our town covered in an urgent haze from nearby...

August 11, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With”

Like the biblical psalms, Nicholas Samaras’s “Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With” speaks for...

July 2017

July 27, 2017

Still Pilgrim

Still Pilgrim. Just the title of Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s new poetry collection makes you pause....

July 07, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Field”

I find solace in the natural world, in those precious moments alone, outside, away from...

July 06, 2017

How To Intuit a Book Title

How do poets and writers choose their book titles? I didn’t have a good answer...

June 2017

June 30, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Fawn”

Narrative poetry has its special challenge: how does it differentiate itself from prose? David Mason’s...

June 23, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Japanese Wall Hanging”

I find myself reading this poem both literally and as a metaphor for our lives....

June 19, 2017

Reading Love Nailed to the Doorpost

If you want to be submerged in the depths of Jewish spirituality, this is the...

June 16, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Prayer”

I used to collect poems that are prayers, so Sharon Cumberland’s “Prayer” immediately leapt out...

June 02, 2017

Poetry Friday: “June Prayer”

How to pray for someone bent over by grief when nature is stretching upward in...

May 2017

May 26, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Key”

I love this poem for its exuberance. The fat bee, “big as a blackberry,” bumping...

May 19, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Spirit of Promise”

Memories can make good material for poetry. In “The Spirit of Promise,” Daniel Donaghy is...

May 12, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Rain”

The emotional landscape of motherhood can often be hard to describe and is underrepresented in...

May 10, 2017

Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer

What would you think of a biography of a famous person written in the form...

May 09, 2017

Disturbing the Silence: Part 2

Flocking to rural life and simple living can be just as much an attempt to...

May 05, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Aging Maria”

The prose poem is a challenging genre. After all, what distinguishes “plain prose” from “prose...

April 2017

April 28, 2017

Poetry Friday: “To Jenya on First Noticing the Dog’s Bowl of My Imagination”

I was first drawn to this poem by Carol Ann Davis because of its long...

April 21, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Sewing Box”

We don’t think enough—or at least I don’t—about how objects can contain memory. But Murray...

April 10, 2017

Dancing with Words During National Poetry Month

Here’s your assignment. Choose a poem you’ve written (it could be any piece of writing,...

April 07, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Last Supper”

This poem is a meditation on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, “The Last Supper.” But...

March 2017

March 17, 2017

Poetry Friday: “In Tandem”

Here is a poem that takes aim at our clichés about aging and death. It...

March 10, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Grief Daybook: A Love Supreme”

It’s fairly common for a poem to be inspired by (or be in conversation with)...

February 2017

February 28, 2017

Dinner with Dona Adélia 

Jessica Goudeau’s translations of the work of Adélia Prado, Brazil’s foremost living poet, appear in...

February 24, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Cartographer of Disaster”

Sometimes a poet will take a familiar story but re-tell it from the point of...

February 10, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Erasure”

Have you ever felt that your own existence is being called into question? That you...

February 03, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Bewilder”

This is a poem about scale, about the awesome power of the Creator, who in...

February 01, 2017

John Slater’s Lean

What is poetry, anyway? I found myself musing about this as I sat with John...

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