Love in all its blissful, blistering forms provides the foundation for lyrical poet Sarah Levine's new book, Each Knuckle with Sugar. A Massachusettes poet, the conversation runs from love to craft to loss. These surprising poems are made more memorable by the way Levine has skillfully built a world to hold them. You can find Levine's book at Driftwood Press: https://www.driftwoodpress.com/product-page/each-knuckle-with-sugar

You can read her poem, "Forgotten Things," in the Paris American here: https://www.theparisamerican.com/sarah-levine-poetry.html

Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press).  A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and James Merrill House, and has won the Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and The Columbia Review Poetry Prize.  His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange.  Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon.  He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University.

We read Charles Wright's "Future Tense."

Dion O’Reilly chats with Roxi Power about her new book, The Songs that Objects Would Sing, diving deep into a work that that “is aflame, both with the literal wildfires ravaging the American West and with the slower smolder of personal grief.  Power’s response to loss and disaster is a quirky plangent song…shot through with humor and underpinned by a rippling ostinato of lyric power” (Mark Scroggins). 

With ease and humor, Dion and Roxi draw on postmodern and Buddhist theories, debating whether the presences that sing within the objects of Power's lines are “essences.”  “I feel you in the glint of objects sometimes.  That’s all I know.” The white "ghost piano" on the book's cover, painted by her sister Sky Power, summons her mother’s musical influence within the titular elegiacal poem. Power conjures and “unpaints” the psycho-geography of Texas and Wyoming, filled with the "ghost-scratchings" of memory that, like de Kooning's paintings, peak through to the surface of the “cinematic fictions she sews from scratch." She bends time in poems such as "The Aftermath of Future" where “Now is just one fold in the snake skin of time.” 

Dion and Roxi discuss Power’s trans-genre work and why she has been drawn to recombinant forms since her MFA work at Cornell University that include music, visual art, and film. Power has taught for 25 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she founded and edits the trans-genre anthology, Viz. Inter-Arts. Her next book is forthcoming from Carbonation Press in 2024.

Power organizes national “Trans-Genre Cabarets,” and her own trans-genre work includes Live Film Narration (Neo-Benshi) performances of original scripts across the country, including the Tennessee Williams Festival, the New Orleans Poetry Festival, REDCAT, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project.  Her next Neo-Benshi performance is Feb. 22 at Satori in Santa Cruz.  

Power organizes events and makes podcasts for The Hive Poetry Collective.  Her most recent podcast is with Brenda Hillman.

Farnaz Fatemi writes: “With both musical and emotional intelligence, not to mention a linguistic virtuosity, Power conjures hope amid her sonic discoveries—while still bearing lucid witness to personal and community grief.”

C.S. Giscombe writes, “The first line of Roxi Power’s incredible burst of poems lays down the law with one hand and sets things in motion with another—that is, she writes as if to remark on the coming noise made by fire, death, love…The many motions of this music, of these songs that objects would sing, will brush the

You can order her book here.

Andrea Hollander⁠, author of ⁠six poetry books⁠, moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for fifteen years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for twenty-two. Hollander’s newly released sixth full-length collection is ⁠And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023)⁠. Her fifth, Blue Mistaken for Sky, was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her fourth, Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982- 2012, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first, House Without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and was recently reissued, along with The Other Life, Hollander’s second full-length collection, by Red Hen Press in its Story Line Legacy series. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction), two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2021 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. After teaching for two literary centers in Portland for six years, in 2017 she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home until the pandemic, and now via Zoom.

⁠Emily Ransdell⁠'s debut collection, ⁠One Finch Singing⁠, was awarded the 2022 Lewis Award and was published in 2023 by Concrete Wolf Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Emily divides her time between Camas Washington and Manazaita Oregon, where she teaches poetry workshops through the Hoffman Center for the Arts.  

Farnaz Fatemi and Julia Chiapella read poems by Palestinian poets and those of Palestinian heritage to amplify and bear witness to the range of their perspectives and the richness of these voices. We found the reading of these aloud to each other to be profoundly moving. Please see the extensive show notes for links to the poets, their books, many more we couldn’t include on the show and other recent resources.

In this order--Fadwa Tuqan, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Zeina Azzam, Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Noor Hindi, Naomi Shihab Nye were featured on the show. 

We mentioned the following anthologies during this hour: We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (Zeina Hashem Beck and Hala Alyan, editors); & Modern Arabic Poetry (Salma Khadra Jayyusi, editor). 

Since recording our episode a week ago, the Palestinian academic and poet ⁠Refaat Alareer⁠ was killed in Gaza; we want to bring attention to the ⁠story of this poem, his last⁠. 

We additionally want to highlight the work of Deema K Shehabi, George Abraham, Nathalie Khankan, and Fady Joudah (also see Joudah’s recent “meditation”), among many, many others. For one additional resource about poets, see the Instagram account, The Palestinian Poetry Project, poetrypalestine.

The LA Review of Books recently published a small folio of writing from poets of Palestinian heritage.

We recommend Palestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide.

Vox Populi published a “ceasefire cento” solicited from poets globally. You can read it here.

Listen in as Robin Gow and Farnaz Fatemi discuss Robin’s book Lanternfly, their experience writing a hyper-focused collection, the value of persona poems, defiance, cross-species empathy and more. 

Robin Gow is a trans poet and YA/Middle Grade author from rural Pennsylvania. They are the author of several poetry collections including, most recently, Lanternfly August, from Driftwood Press, & Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy. Gow also writes queer YA/Middle Grade novels such as Ode to My First Car, A Million Quiet Revolutions, and Dear Mothman. He manages community programs at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, building celebratory spaces for the local LGBTQ+ folks. As an autistic person, Robin feels passionate about celebrating neurodivergent folks in the queer community. They live in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with their partner, best friend, and pugs, Gertrude and Eddie. 

Ruba Ahmed joins Julie Murphy to read "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski and talks about his imperative to see the beauty in the world that lies right beside the horrors. She also reads from her new book Bring Now the Angels and shares her struggle in coming to forgiveness and grief and joy. Ruba also shares some great insights on the power of repetition as well as the importance of Keat's concept of negative capability.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pittsburg Poetry). Her debut book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has taught with Swarthmore College, Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.
Find her classes & consultations on her website. She's also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Dion O'Reilly and Pacific Northwest poet, ⁠Jeannine Hall Gailey,⁠ talk about science, science fiction, and poetry. Jeannine reads from her new book ⁠Flare Corona. ⁠

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of six books of poetry: ⁠Becoming the Villainess⁠, ⁠She Returns to the Floating World⁠, which was a finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal and a winner of a Florida Publishers Association Presidential Award for Poetry, ⁠Unexplained Fevers⁠, ⁠The Robot Scientist’s Daughter,⁠ and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, ⁠Field Guide to the End of the World⁠. Her sixth poetry book, Flare, Corona, is upcoming from BOA Editions. She’s also the author of ⁠PR for Poets: A Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing.⁠ She has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Her poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. In 2007 she received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and in 2007 and 2011 a ⁠Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. 

To kick off Trans Week of Awareness (Nov. 13 - 19), Geneffa Jahan sits down with local youth poet, Madeline Aliah (age 17) to hear how poetry has given her hope and a voice. Madeline reads from her chapbook of poems, This Is My Body: Poems by a Teen Trans Fem, forthcoming from Jamii Press (2024), and additional works that take her poetry beyond identity politics. She speaks of her activism through the Queer Trans Youth Council and shares advice for allies, reminding us through her wit and wisdom that Queer kids are still just kids.

Roxi Power talks with Brenda Hillman, winner this month of the Northern California Book Reviewers’ Fred Cody Award  for Lifetime Achievement, about her 11th book of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later.   We discuss her new trans-genre tetralogy about time: how to find calm during the Anthropocene by being in time in multiple ways: sinking into the micro-minutes; performing micro-activism; and celebrating the microbiome. We explore her influences–from Blake to Bergson, Clare to Baudelaire, as well as the less celebrated moss, owls, and wood rats that appear frequently in her eco-poetry.  Alive with humor, witness, creative design and punctuation–what Forrest Gander calls “typographical expressionism”--Hillman’s poetry teaches us how to abide in crisis from Covid to California fires, living in paradox as a way to transcend despair.

Brenda Hillman shares the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award with with Isabel Allende, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Pollan, Ishmael Reed, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Alice Walker and others. Winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Griffin Poetry Prize (for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, 2013), the Northern California Book Award (for Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, 2018) and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975.  

She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems for Shambhala Press, and co-edited and co-translated several books.  She is director of the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and is on the regular poetry staff ad Napa Valley Writers Conference. Hillman just retired from teaching in the MFA Program at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA.  She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother, grandmother, and is married to poet, Robert Hass. 

Photograph by Robert Hass.