Poetry Unbound

A new season of Poetry Unbound — its 11th! — will begin one month from now on Monday, November 30; episodes will be released on Mondays and Fridays. Before then, there will be two more Poetry Unbound In Conversation episodes. For now, in recognition of Halloween, Pádraig Ó Tuama reads aloud Edgar Allen Poe’s classic poem “The Raven.”   

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Edgar Allen Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, and he was the...

This episode isn’t about poetry but about another kind of art: the art of conflict resolution. In a deeply practical conversation, Pádraig Ó Tuama sits down with Columbia University’s Peter Coleman, author of The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization and an expert in constructive conflict. Coleman shares advice for “the exhausted middle majority” — the large number of Americans fed up with our divided politics — on how to engage with others in ways that lead to openness and learning. He also talks about the surprising power of taking a walk with your challenger, the limitations of bringing toget...

“Politics by themselves are necessary but not sufficient … [and] poetry by itself is necessary but not sufficient. We must find a way to bring them together,” says Martín Espada, a poet and professor. With crystalline language, an all-seeing gaze, and innate musicality, he writes poems that show us the world and people as they are — sometimes violent, vicious, unjust, but also tender, tenacious, courageous. In this potent conversation recorded for the 2026 Greenbelt Festival in Kettering, England, he reads from his work, and he and Pádraig Ó Tuama discuss the resistance he’s met when mixing politics and poetry, his parents as...

After actor, dialect coach, and teacher Amanda Quaid was diagnosed with a serious illness in 2021, she responded by trying something new — she wrote poetry. She says, “I was looking for an art form that allowed me to be with uncertainty in a beautiful way.” The result is a captivating memoir-in-poetry, No Obvious Distress, that uses words and phrases from her medical charts to create verse that rings with laughter, tears, and truth. In this conversation recorded at New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum, Amanda reads from her book, and she and Pádraig Ó Tuama talk about the three principles...

Poet, translator, and musician Haleh Liza Gafori describes the revered 13th-century Persian poet Rumi as “a good pal to humanity”. As she puts it, “He's rooting for our liberation.” In this exuberant conversation recorded for the 2025 Greenbelt Festival, she reads some of her translations, and she and Pádraig Ó Tuama illuminate the life of the man known as Rumi — his intense love of all things earthly and divine, the Islamic faith and universalist vision that flow through his work, and his life-changing connection with Shams, a Sufi mystic who catalyzed Rumi’s transformation from preacher to poet.

We invite you...

“For me, if a poem doesn't swing, it's really not much of a poem,” says Adrian Matejka, author of the collection Be Easy: New and Selected Poems. His work hums with music, from its references to David Bowie, Miles Davis, and others to its infectious rhythms, repetitions, and rhymes. In this lively conversation recorded in 2024 at the Wick Poetry Center in Ohio, he reads several poems, and he and Pádraig Ó Tuama talk about “the imaginary discotheque” that takes place in Adrian’s head when he writes, how metaphor and simile offer a third space for his ideas to reach people...

After listening to this exuberant interview, you’ll retire the phrase “lost in translation” from your vocabulary. Instead, writer and scholar Karen Leeder believes poetry can expand when  translated, reaching new audiences and gaining new layers of meaning. Karen joins Pádraig Ó Tuama in an interview recorded in 2025 after she and Durs Grünbein were co-awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for her translation of Psyche Running, which Durs wrote. In addition to reading from her work, she explains what it’s like to translate a poet who is very much alive and why she thinks translation can help “explode” insularity and x...

“Poetry means paying attention in a different way to the world and seeing what wisdom you're given back in return for that attention,” says Richard Scott in this conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama, recorded during the 2025 Collective Trauma Summit. Richard’s second collection, That Broke Into Shining Crystals, features sequences that focus on two hypnotically compelling subjects: still-life paintings and crystals. From them, he’s created poems that thrum with music, memory, harm, and healing. Richard reads from his book, and he and Pádraig discuss the “surprising life” to be found in still lifes, the difference between the speaker vs. the...

“It had to involve more than just a slim volume of verse,” says Kimberly Campanello about MOTHERBABYHOME, her ongoing visual poetry project which centers the 796 infants and children who died at the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, in the west of Ireland, between 1926 and 1961. So it consists of 796 sheets of vellum with text from archival and contemporary sources that she’s shaped into a work that blends documentation and lamentation, reportage and rite. In this Zoom conversation between Kimberly and Pádraig Ó Tuama  — part two of two — recorded in 2025, Kimberly reads an excerpt from MOTHERBABYHOME, and then she and P...

“It's about seeing, through reading, whether where you are going has been or is now or will be written, or not.” This deliciously twisty line is from Kimberly Campanello’s ongoing versioning of Dante’s Inferno, and as in that sentence, she is translating and reconfiguring the 700-year-old work of poetry to reflect her life, her family’s lives, your life, our life, and, indeed, our lives today. We are delighted to bring you this exhilarating conversation — part one of two — between Kimberly and Pádraig Ó Tuama that was recorded over Zoom in 2025. In addition to reading excerpts from her redone Dante...

“Poetry should be horrifying,” says Rachel Mann. “It should be … on the edge of the edge of what could be said.” We are delighted to bring you this vibrant conversation featuring Rachel and Yomi Ṣode speaking with Pádraig Ó Tuama at the 2024 StAnza Poetry Festival in Scotland. Rachel and Yomi each read poems, and then go on to discuss grace, who receives it, and who deserves it; the place of grief and remembrance in their work; and how writing about historical figures is a way to disrupt and re-vision both the past and the present.  

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From a young age, says Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah, “I had such a fascination with the way the alphabet makes music in the mind.” We are thrilled to offer this thoughtful conversation between Pádraig and Fady, recorded when Fady received the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize. Fady reads several poems — including two with the same name! — and speaks of how memory, time, history, faith, love, violence, and difference figure in his work. He says, “Ultimately for my existence as a Palestinian in the 20th or 21st century … I am also always, particularly in English, bridging a gap.”

We invite...

“I still have the best three-point shot of any Canadian poet born before 1943” is one of the first things that acclaimed poet Don McKay says in this expansive and intimate exchange. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Padraig and Don, recorded from a virtual interview held on the occasion of Don receiving the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Poetry Prizes. After touching on his early devotion to basketball, Don speaks of his lifelong passion for geology and birds, how Newfoundland is considered “opera for geologists”,  and why he favors membership over mastery when it comes to relating...

Host Pádraig Ó Tuama shares “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare, a favorite childhood poem of his, and offers an audio postscript to Season 10 of Poetry Unbound. Later in 2026, he will bring us more Poetry Unbound to look forward to — find out what and when here. In the meantime, you can listen to past episodes of Poetry Unbound or to new episodes of On Being with Krista Tippett, out now.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Po...

Have you ever watched, in awe, as a skilled gymnast or skater lifts off and completes a dizzying number of revolutions in less than a second before landing safely back down? That’s how you may feel upon reading the great Leonard Cohen’s urgent, dreamlike poem “I, 8” from Book of Mercy. In his telling of a man’s fall “from his high place” into “disgrace”, Cohen sends us on a short, 206-word journey that seamlessly weaves together narration, fiction, meditation, devotion, and prayer.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound...

Will you leave this episode feeling uplifted, envious, curious, or something else entirely? Yes. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poem “Subarctica” transports you to a vividly specific time — “the coldest December / on record, I haven’t left my mother’s / house in over a week” — where the primary view is of poplars in “a tiny schoolyard”. Amid the simplicity and snow, the speaker shifts their perspective, seeing beyond their past and towards the wonder in their present and in what is to come. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newe...

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s delicious and dexterous “Carne” begins with these lines: “I've eaten pork from / pernil to chuletas to chitterlings.” And just in case you were wondering — and even if you’re not — the speaker goes on to list much more of the seafood, poultry, and animal parts that have been consumed and how they were cooked. Lest you think this poem is simply a meat-eater’s manifesto, savor its final turn towards what else the speaker is really hungry for. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books an...

Loving in the face of violence, danger, and distress is an act of defiance, as demonstrated in Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s achingly beautiful poem “Dukka”.  The Palestinian American writer spotlights seven aspects of love in action — between father and newborn, for example, a journalist and her audience, a pair of intimates dining out. She shows us the “million ways to love” flowing through her community and cascading through generations, centuries, millennia, as inexorable and constant as the ocean and as bright and surprising as a rare meteor shower. 

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Rachel Mann’s “#TDOR” manages to turn a depiction of one side of a conversation about marking Trans Day of Remembrance into a poem that is both empathic and uncompromising. Mann captures the verbal stammers and stumbles of the well-meaning but leaves us to reckon whether the words land as mirror, mockery, or cry for action. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Rachel Mann is a priest, writer, and broadcaster...

Sanah Ahsan’s evocative “Ramadan’s Greeting” brings us into the thoughts and experiences of a person observing the holiest month in Islam. In nine brief couplets, the poet deftly directs our attention towards some of the rich contrasts that emerge at this time — between light and dark, desire and abstinence, self and community — as well as the abiding satisfactions and joys. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Sanah Ahsan is a poet, l...

“O come, in any way you want” is the first line in Kevin Hart’s marvelous, mystical “Prayer”. So come to this poem — whether for its deliciously sensual language (“bouts of rain”, “wind that wraps”, “raw and ragged smells / [o]f gumleaves”, and more), its air of mystery, or its unabashed aching for a “you” — and then linger for a while. Stay with it, or let it stay with you, and see what emerges.   

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Un...

Too many of us left high school thinking that a poem could be taken seriously only if it was difficult to understand, subdued in its use of rhyme and alliteration, and addressed lofty topics. Harryette Mullen’s saucy, suggestive “LVTOFU” bulldozes through convention, all the while revelling in its own rhythms, references, and humor.   

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Harryette Mullen is the author of eight books of poetry, includ...

What is there to say or do when the life of a loved one has been upended and devastated? Stewart Henderson’s poem “How To Speak Love In A Storm?” offers a tender masterclass in how you can accompany someone — or even just yourself — through a time of tumult and pain. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Stewart Henderson is a Liverpool-born, best-selling poet, song lyricist, and award-winning broadcaster. He has published...

Dante Micheaux’s rich and rollicking poem “Theologies for Korah” is written on the occasion of an infant’s baptism, but it’s anything but baby talk or bland instruction. Religious figures, rites, and symbols are proffered, not as liturgy or lore to be swallowed whole, eyes shut, but as people, stories, and ideas that cry out to be seen, played with, and engaged with.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Dante Michea...

“How could there be a war in this city?” is the plaintive question that starts Oksana Makysymchuk’s “Arguments for Peace”. Like ours, the world of her poem holds both the “goodness of the universe” and “a foreign leader / warning of invasion”. She offers no pat answers for what to do in the face of conflict — just a dizzying sense of disbelief and the deep desire to hold tight to the people and life around us.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or l...

In Armen Davoudian’s casually intimate poem “Coming Out of the Shower”,  mother and son perform their morning routines in the small, shared space of their household’s only bathroom. She chats and puts on her makeup, while he showers and uses her shampoo and robe — oh what rhythm, affection, and ease are to be seen in this dance they both know so well.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Armen Davoudian...

Some religions and some people have very specific ideas about “grace”, and that includes poet Orlando Ricardo Menes. In the carefully constructed “Grace”, he manages to both demystify and remystify what grace is, leaving us with the possibility that at any moment or no moment it could pour down and quench us all. Intrigued? Confused? Give this episode a listen.  

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Orlando Ricardo Menes teaches in the C...

In fewer than two dozen lines, Cyrus Cassells’s poem “Jasmine” offers readers a multisensory, cinematic immersion into late spring life in Rome. Not only is the “sweet, steady broadcast” of jasmine ever-present amid “the joyous braiding of sun and rain”, but there’s also Daria, a “crone-glorious” neighbor, with a story about her romance with the gallant Galliano. It’s la dolce vita, without overindulgence or artifice. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  ...

W.S. Merwin’s “For The Anniversary of My Death” is a slim, precise poem — just 13 lines made up of 84 words — about the very weightiest of subjects, one’s future death. With it, Merwin has crafted an elegant vessel, a small and sturdy container to hold some of life’s big questions, uncertainties, and feelings. Are you ready to gaze at it, grasp it, sit with it? And as you contemplate death, he gently reminds, remain here — where there’s rain, birdsong, and life right in front of you.  

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and att...

Words can’t quite fully capture the activity, oddity, and awe that is everywhere around us, but poet Kimberly Blaeser makes a gorgeous attempt in her poem “my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers.” The three stanzas overflow with an exuberance of colorful creatures — from checked loons and flitting mayflies to a “blissful beaver” and a “red squirrel swimming (yes! swimming)” — and with love — love of the natural world, of looking, of language, of the language of looking, and of being present for such everyday wonders. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the...

Marie Howe’s poetry shimmers with the keen attention she pays to language: the language of the body (both the human body and “the beautiful body of the world”), of people’s everyday speech, and of religious myth. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Marie, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. Marie reads several poems, and together, they discuss Mary Magdalene as complex everywoman, the “eternal energy” of dead loved ones that fills Marie’s life and work, and her current efforts to listen to what the Earth is saying to us...

“Spending time in hell is not my idea of something that one should do,” says poet Lorna Goodison, yet she immersed herself there for years to create her extraordinary modern Jamaican translation of Dante’s Inferno. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Lorna, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. She reads from her work, and together, they discuss Lorna’s inspiration for her underworld undertaking, how she found her Virgil, and why she calls The Inferno “bitter, necessary medicine for now.”   

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Have you ever gotten consumed by watching a couple argue in public and trying to decipher what’s really going on between them? Denise Duhamel’s deliciously entertaining “How It Will End” offers us that experience. Come for the voyeurism, stay for the awareness it stirs up. Why are we so captivated by other people’s disagreements? And how can what we notice about them teach us about ourselves?

Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Pink Lady, Scald, and...

Even though Palestinian-American Fady Joudah’s poem is sparingly titled “[...],” an ellipsis surrounded by brackets, this work itself is psychologically dense. Through crisp lines and language, it wrestles with the nature of human ambivalence — about things like fear, desire, disaster, liberty — and it finds certainty only in the shaky universal ground of that ambivalence.

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published five other collections of poems, including Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated se...

Benjamin Zephaniah’s urgent, imperative “To Michael Menson” was written when he was a poet in residence at a human rights barrister in England. His poem resonates with his repeated calls for justice for a murdered Black musician — not a justice that is gullible, impotent, or hopeless but one that is clear-eyed, collaborative, and mighty.

Benjamin Zephaniah was born and raised in Birmingham, England. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including City Psalms, Propa Propaganda, and Too Black, Too Strong. In 2000, he was poet in residence for the chambers of human rights barrister Michael Mansfiel...

Carmen Giménez’s poem “Ars Poetica” is a stunning waterfall of words, a torrent of dozens of short statements that begin with “I” or “I’m.” As you listen to them, let an answering cascade of questions fill up your mind. What does this series of confessions reveal to you about poetry? The poet? And yourself?

Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry, and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre L...

Rick Barot’s poem “The Singing” takes place in the humdrum, relatable setting of the waiting room at a car dealership. But the unexpected occurs when one woman’s soft humming builds into strange, full-throated singing. Curiosity, wonder, anger, and dread spill over, forcing you to face the same dilemma as the narrator: What can you do when reality defies your control?

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Barot teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and is the...

“You would’ve made a lousy nun.” The narrator of Diannely Antigua’s “Another Poem about God, but Really It’s about Me” overhears these words, and they jolt her into contrasting her life experience with the limited archetypes offered by her church — good daughter, good sister, holy woman, whore. Which of these has she been? Where does her devotion lie? And what virtue can she claim?

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican-American poet and educator who was born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection, Ugly Music, won a 2020 Whiting Award and the Pamet River Prize. She received her MFA...

Don McKay’s poem “Neanderthal Dig” begins with the discovery of an ancient, child-sized skeleton placed on the wing of a swan and then takes flight, showing us how love and death are riddled with paradoxes — mixing the earthbound and the sacred, the personal and the universal, the time-stamped and the never ending.

Don McKay is the multi-award-winning author of multiple books of poetry, including Lurch, Paradoxides, Strike/Slip (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize), and Camber: Selected Poems (finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year). McKay has taught poetry...

When dictatorial leaders use talk of peace as a smokescreen to conceal their plans for war and  destruction, what are the people to do? Believe in a vision of peace and freedom that is muscular, sturdy, and protective — and pray that it holds, as Ernesto Cardenal does in his poem “Give Ear to My Words (Psalm 5),” translated by Jonathan Cohen.

Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020) was a Catholic priest and poet who was born in Nicaragua. From 1979 to 1988, he served as the Minister of Culture there. Cardenal was the author of several volumes of poetry, including Pluriverse, Zero Hour, Apocalypse, and In Cu...