With Jack Spicer and Federico Garcia Lorca at his heels, ⁠Albert Flynn DeSilver⁠ talks about his latest book, SOME VOID: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2026 as well as his other poetry collection, ⁠Hadrian’s Wall⁠. Working outside the zeitgeist, as Albert says, is a path many poets have taken. Hear him talk about his own path, including its beginning as outlined in the popular memoir ⁠Beamish Boy⁠. The inaugural poet laureate of Marin County, Califonia, DeSilver is also a photographer and writing coach.

In the first of two interviews, Roxi Power talks with poet Elizabeth Robinson about Vulnerability Index, her 2026 poetry book charting her work with the unhoused population of Boulder, Colorado. Through multiple hybrid forms––confessions, parables, lists, and narratives that refuse resolution––Robinson’s collaged fragments rearrange what Joan Retallack has called our “geometries of attention”upon the fractured lives of those members of society who often go unattended.

The fascinating and beautiful characters Robinson helps and befriends become our friends too as we journey with her through the “casual cruelty” of the social services world with its impossible intake forms and hurdles to both heroic and tragicoutcomes.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of over 20 books, including, most recently Vulnerability Index, published in 2026by Curbstone Books of Northwestern University Press. Her poetry has earned the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend, among other recognitions. Robinson has taught at the University of San Francisco, Naropa University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.She is currently a senior pastor at Orinda Community Church in the Bay Area and teaches at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop. Robinson lives with her husband, poet Randy Prunty.

https://www.elizabethrobinsonpoetry.com/about

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810149205/vulnerability-index/

Farnaz Fatemi talked with Diana Whitney about her maximalist, long armed book, Girl Trouble, a book full with exploration of girlhood, secrets, trauma and also female power.

References in the show:

Diana's essay in Longreads:  The Killer Who Spared My Mother

Ariel Levy’s reporting on the Steubenville rape case: Trial by Twitter

Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich - Netflix documentary featuring voices of survivors

Quote by Rebecca Solnit comes from her incisive essay “Cassandra Among the Creeps” "Sexual assault, like torture, is an attack on a victim’s right to bodily integrity, to self-determination and -expression. It’s annihilatory, silencing."

Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of three full-length poetry books, Wanting It, Dark Beds, and Girl Trouble. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other outlets. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.

Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) sat tangential to The Beats but was singularly distinct from them. As a self-described "serious romantic, “ Gilbert roared onto the scene with his book Views of Jeopardy, earning him a Guggenheim Fellowship and a loyal following. We look at books from The Great Fires as well as earlier work. An outsider poet, In 2013 he was posthumously selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

January Gill O’Neil reads and discusses Lucille Clifton's "Won't You Celebrate with Me" and also poems from January's newest book, Glitter Road.

January Gill O’Neil is a poet whose work explores the afterlives of history in American landscapes and intimate lives. Her poems trace how place, memory, and moral inheritance shape identity across generations, joining lyric precision with documentary attention and restraint.

She is the author of four poetry collections published by CavanKerry Press: Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009). Glitter Road received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize and was a finalist for several honors, including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.

A Cave Canem fellow, O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival from 2012 to 2018 and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a former chair of the AWP Board of Directors and its longest-serving current board member. She earned her B.A. at Old Dominion University and her MFA. at New York University.

In this episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, poet Cate Lycurgus opens the show with a reading of “Jacaranda” by Shirley Kaufman, setting the tone for a conversation attuned to beauty, impermanence, and change. Host Julie Murphy then speaks with Cate about her chapbook Seacliff and her new manuscript, Radiance, Despite.

Moving poem by poem, they explore erosion and belonging, caregiving and grief, fractured faith, and the intimate question at the heart of her work: what is care but where we put our hands?

Cate’s poems are precise, unflinching, and luminous — attentive to the ways love reshapes us, and to how even what has been broken may still shine.

This conversation reeks with the funk of gratitude!

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s new collection of poetry, The New Economy, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry. Other collections include The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing, and Rocket Fantastic, which is the winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. They serve on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and live in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. 

José and Dion read "Entrance" by Rainer Maria Rilke and then from José's new book Haunt Me.

José Enrique Medina earned his BA in English from Cornell University. His book Haunt Me won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize. His second book, Man Without a Skirt, was selected by Ellen Bass as the runner-up for the 2025 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in USA Today Hispanic Living Magazine, Best Microfiction 2019, The Los Angeles Review, Redivider, and other publications. He is a VONA fellow and the founder of the Chickens & Poetry Residency for Writers. You can connect with him on Instagram @MedinaWrites or at www.MedinaWrites.com.

After their first time reading together, poet-pals Lynne and Patricia sit down with a seriously sleep-deprived Dion at the Dream Inn in Santa Cruz, California to read and discuss their poems as the sound of waves pulses in the background.

Lynne Thompson was the 4th Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, to name a few.

Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner 2025), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry; Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler,  BOMB, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays.

Smith is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.

Dion and Hannah discuss poems loosely themed around nurture, connection and loss. Dion reads Marge Piercey’s “Tao of Touch,” Jericho Brown’s “Reunion Tour” and “Information Only” by Dale Hudson, and Hannah shares Wislawa Szymborska’s “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” “Lighthouse” by Ellen Bass and “Since We’re Not Young” by Adrienne Rich.