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.

Join translator Niloufar Talebi as she talks with Farnaz Fatemi about her new book, Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems of Ahmad Shamlou, iconic Iranian 20th poet, Ahmad Shamlou, an innovator in Persian poetry and socially conscious writer.

Extras:

A companion YouTube playlist for this episode, which features original Persian recitations by Ahmad Shamlou alongside English translation readings and interviews about Shamlou by Niloufar Talebi. Fiind it here.

Bios:

One of the most influential cultural figures of Iran in the latter half of the twentieth century, Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) authored more than 70 books, including 18 volumes of poetry. Sometimes known by his pen name, Alef Bamdad, Shamlou’s innovations brought on a transition from classical forms to free verse and made him a flag-bearer of the Iranian vanguard, which included the poet Forough Farrokhzad. Shamlou’s synthesis of Eastern and Western poetic traditions and high and low styles democratized the literary mode without simplifying it. Championing the “everyman,” Shamlou’s work reflects his deep engagement with social issues and the human condition.

Niloufar Talebi is an author, educator, producer, and multidisciplinary storyteller whose work spans literature, opera, performance, and cultural translation. Her practice is rooted in reinvention—transforming language and lived experience into art that awakens, stirs, and liberates. Niloufar is the editor and translator of Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems by Ahmad Shamlou (World Poetry, 2025), a sweeping centennial edition of Iran’s iconic twentieth-century poet of liberty, whose work shaped modern Persian poetry. Her memoir Self-Portrait in Bloom (l’Aleph, 2019), praised as “a hybrid wonder” (The Rumpus), combines personal narrative with her award-winning translations of Nobel Prize–nominated Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou. The book inspired the acclaimed opera Abraham in Flames (2019), which she commissioned, produced, presented, and co-created in collaboration with composer Aleksandra Vrebalov and director Roy Rallo.

We read and discuss "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats and poems from her newest book Burn, published in 2025 by Pitt Press.

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times. She is the author of seven poetry collections including Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), All-Night Lingo Tango (2009), and Babel (2004). Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire (1999) won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry. Her first book, Delirium (1995), won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation honored Barbara as a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. Her short story collection Lester Higata’s 20th Century won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Barbara edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is a Distinguished University Scholar.

Roxi Power talks with co-editor Dion O’Reilly about poems in the second volume of En•Trance, an online journal about altered states, in particular, those that arise from entering “the lyric moment” in surreal and visionary poetry.  As always, we laugh, accepting “there is always more dark” as we enter the shadow in strangely humorous poems.

In Liz Cambra’s “Survey,” she asks librarians, marmosets, anglerfish, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning whether they welcome “the return of the dark” when “volcanos shut off” in Iceland. Kim Adonnizio takes us on a journey into the chimeric dream images of childhood where “a man might be half-scorpion, a woman half fish” in “Kansas, 4:00am.”  

We travel through the ears of a dreamer “like looking down a well-lit hallway into another room” in Sally Ashton’s “Form is the opposite of dream.”  And then we travel even further into earthly and unearthly realms, through the mythical soundscapes of Marc Vincenz’s “The First Gods,” seeing “omens/in the curdled milk/of the fat-tailed sheep.”

Join us on our entrancing journey into the strange music ofpoetry where  “There is another world, and it’s this one.”  –Paul Éluard. 

Entrancejournal.net

We read from Matthew's newest book and also the poem My Father's Locker by James Ciano.

Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, Publishers Weekly, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

In this episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, host Julie Murphy talks with poet Preeti Vangani about humor, loss, and the surprising ways joy can hold our grief. The episode opens with Vangani reading Ross Gay’s beloved poem “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” setting the tone for an exploration of abundance and community. Vangani then reads several poems from her new collection of poems Fifty Mothers available here for presale. discusses craft, memory, lineage, and the intergenerational textures of care. She reflects on her workshops in Writing Grief Through Joy, and the surprising healing possibilities that emerge when poetry turns its attention toward the everyday.A warm, intimate conversation with one of today’s most compelling emerging poets. Sunday night at 8 p.m. on KSQD Santa Cruz 90.7, 89.7, and 89.5 FM, or anytime at HivePoetry.org.

Three “bees” from The Hive Poetry Collective warm your minds with cozy—and existential–conversation about winter poems as we draw closer to the Winter Solstice.  

Roxi Power talks with Julia Chiapella and Parker Shabala live in the Santa Cruz KSQD radio station about poetry ranging from Shakespeare’s sonnet to his beloved about aging to Elizabeth Robinson’s new poetry about members of the unhoused community surviving frostbite. We talk about winter’s philosophical soundscapes  in Louise Glück’s “bone dice/of blown gravel clicking” and in the U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze’s “world of being [that] is like this gravel:/ you think you own a car, a house, /this blue zig-zagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.”

Tune in and let us borrow an hour of your time to enjoy Kenneth Patchen’s spiritual and erotic snowscapes, laugh about Anne Sexton’s branches that “wear the sock of God,” and contemplate Wallace Stevens’  “mind of winter” that beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate Nancy Miller Gomez founded the Rising Voices Program, providing Santa Cruz County high school students with workshops led by local poets devoted to introducing poetry to teens. Listen in to hear some of the students read their poetry and learn from the teachers participating how poetry is affecting young lives.