“It’s five below”…Cindy Veach takes a cold look at Salem, MA, and the Sackler Family in this poem that considers how appearances can disguise horrors. Read "Feeding the Meter in the Witch City" at Poets Reading The News and find more poems by Cindy Veach here.

"To get here, I had to say goodbye to guilt." Martha Silano's wild and beautiful poem tackles the form grief makes in time and space, among other things. Read “Soul Reckoning” at Verse Daily and find more of Martha Silano’s work here.

"Randomness if the mad king of fear." Julie Danho's poem illuminates how we rationalize our fears at the expense of others. A beautiful and merciless poem. Read "Distance" at Blackbird and find more of Julie Dan's work here.

“She fights men.” Meghan Dunn's piece is praise poem for the wrestler Chyna and a reflection on inhabiting the fullness of our bodies. Read the poem here at Verse Daily and find more of Meghan’s work at her website.

“There’s nothing more sinister than a secret.” Rota’s poem takes me on a funhouse journey through knowledge, power, and climate change. Read the poem here.

In this episode, I talk about one of my longtime favorite poems, Hayden Carruth's "Regarding Chainsaws,"which is both a great persona poem and a necessarily unsentimental exploration or rural life.

What do a beaver and a murderous golfer have in common? In Kevin Prufer’s poem “True Crime,” they both embody the world’s relentless desire to accrue. “True Crime” can be found online (behind a paywall) at A Public Space, or in Prufer’s 2018 book How He Loved Them.

Find Emma Bolden’s poem “After Watching An Inconvenient Truth With My Students” at Verse Daily, and read more from Emma at her website.

Read “Waiting for Happiness” here at Tin House, and you can find more from Nomi at her website.

Could feeling like a robot help me grieve? Yes. Read “Self-Operating Machines,” from Rebecca Morgan Frank’s book Oh You Robot Saints! on Verse Daily, and find Frank’s website here.