Poetry Lunch

Poetry Lunch reading series

Informal poetry reading series with Myrna Keliher, live on Instagram @expeditionpress and archived here. Also! We listed all the books on bookshop.org so you can buy them and read them.

Everything
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5
Season 6

Reading “At Some Moment the Confidence Snaps” by June Jordan

A poem about time and not taking it for granted; about uncertainty and living with it; about being in the present moment.

Reading “Diaspora Sonnet with Swifts Insisting on Their Accomodations” by Oliver de la Paz

There’s a sweeping feeling here that I know well of watching a mass of birds move together with swift precision that you know is utterly unplanned yet is perfectly synchronized. It makes me feel like anything is possible, watching birds like that.

Reading “Things” by Jane Kenyon

We go from eternity to failing, from lasting to not, from small specifics to the wider human condition. I love how a poem can stretch so far over so few words.

Reading “The Chance” by Arthur Sze

There’s a shift I notice lately, maybe because l’ve felt chance come more than once — that the striving is less necessary than the being.

Reading “Any Common Desolation” by Ellen Bass

This poem reminds me to look up, and to pause. To take note of the world around me when my insides are tore up or even just grating.

Reading “Why” by Jorie Graham

I like the simple language in this poem, and the way it speeds up but stays anchored outdoors, and that it doesn’t attempt to answer any of the whys.

Reading “The World Has Need of You” by Ellen Bass

I feel the lines of the poem swinging like the arms in the beginning, a prayer for being all the ways we are, all the unavoidable ebb and flow of it.

Reading “25” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This poem feels like a wry romp through an overgrown field, that has flowers for you to smell and wonder at but also those annoying burr-like seed pods that stick to everything.

Reading “Naming the Heartbeats” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

How might our sweetest selves dream new ways of being? How might we give the love we have for our most intimate relations to folks we don’t know at all?

Reading from “Transgender Heroic: All This Ridiculous Flesh” by Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Change on top of change and it just keeps coming. I love the idea that we could arrive, after all, through all of it, to a place where our hearts are simple again.

Reading “For the Thousandth Time, I Want to Know” by Mark Nepo

I always want to know everything. I’ve been blindsided by plenty in my life and it’s still hard as ever to breathe easy with any big unknown looming. But I do want to try.

Reading “How to Stay Sorry” by Geffrey Davis

This poem makes me think about all the different ways I relate to anger, and old hurt. How I carry them. How they are related. How I let them be and how I don’t.

Reading “For the Young Vine Maples” by David Wagoner

Wanted, unwanted, bent or straight, looking for light always and “alive where they are.” Something about that line I find very soothing, it reminds me to be alive where I am, less concerned with where I should be.

Listening to “Maunakea” by No‘u Revilla

This poem makes me miss my grandma, and worry and wonder after the seeds inside me and out, and remember the regenerative qualities of water.

Reading “Heart Butte, Montana” by M. L. Smoker

I feel like I’m always hovering there in the almost, between ways. The less I think about it the more I’m in it and the more I think the farther I get from the path I was feeling out.

Reading “Warning” by Jenny Joseph

A poem about cutting loose and letting go, about not caring what others think, about living with abandon and questioning when that’s possible.

Reading three poems from The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang

Each poem almost feels like a stone itself, polished smooth and hard and weighing heavy for its size. There’s a deep paring down I feel in the language and a lot of finality, too.

Reading “What You Are Doing Is Living” by M. Soledad Caballero

This poem weaves the natural world into the unnatural world of medical exams, diagnoses, treatment. Mush of dead crabs on the beach, wrong cells replicating.

Reading “Fetishes of the Floating World” by Don Domanski

I love how these words float while the lines ground them, and their strong movement forward while fighting to be present.

Reading “Lullaby” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

I love the honesty of this poem. It makes our failure plain, in a simple excruciating way, and I find that helpful.

Reading “Our sermon today concerns the dialectic” by Terrance Hayes

I love how tight and smooth and strong these sonnets are, while managing to be so grounded, and reach wildly high, and break off lines in masterful opening-up inviting-in kinds of ways.

Reading “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

So many poems deal with loss, I think in large part because it’s a topic that’s hard to assign words to. This take makes light of an awful heavy that hits you full square at the end.

Reading “What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade” by Brad Aaron Modlin

... made me feel all the things I’ve been trying to learn that I always think I should already know. Isn’t obvious to know how to feel at home, for instance?

Reading “Untitled poem about sensitization” & “The things the dead have touched” by Erin Noteboom

If you’ve had someone impossibly close die impossibly (and isn’t death always impossible to us living?) then you know those terrible awkward decisions that have to happen about socks.

Reciting “Throwing Away the Mail” by Wendell Berry

What have you tried to simplify lately that wasn’t simple?

Reading “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” by Jane Wong

There are so many issues in our world rooted in wanting more. This poem gives us more and then some...

Reading “There, There, Grieving” by Zeina Hashem Beck

We go from deep dear familiarity to blown wide open nothing/everything in a line and a half.

Reading “Leaving” by Li-Young Lee

I love the idea of less nearness making way for more farness, for things far to get to come into view.

Reading three poems by Mosab Abu Toha

Imagine waking to the ground shaking, looking out your window, and seeing your neighbor’s house gone.

Reading “In all of my dreams, the words I love you” by Hanif Abdurraqib

I like the forgetting and remembering that keeps happening throughout the poem and how it becomes an act of drowning itself; I certainly feel washed up and shook up and glad to be alive here at the shore of just having read it.

Reading “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight” by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke’s idea of stretching strengths between opposites, maybe even finding strength there — it unsettled me and I think it provided a key to find my way out of forced dualities. Or at least allowed for a door.

Reading “kara sevde” by Amber Flame

“dear reader, this is a spell for you. if you’ve been lonely, or broken. if you’ve longed for love that did not make you afraid to be whole. if you’ve longed to be free and longed to be home…”

Reading “Loveable” by Raymond Antrobus

Have you ever not said “I love you too” when someone said “I love you”? Have you been on the other end, received that silence?

Reading “Woman with Amputated Breast at her Mother-in-Law's Grave” by Katie Farris

I feel the poem pushing at that door to the grave as it moves from line to line, wondering wide and coming back in tight to the details of daily life.

Reading “The River of Bees” by W.S. Merwin

This poem has me mulling on living vs surviving, vs thriving — I tend to be one for extremes so the idea of a middle ground being the point, or the place is foreign.

Reading “A Thousand Twangling Instruments” by T. Liem

For me this poem holds a lot of both/and: acceptance and standing up; quiet and strength; being and not; continuing and returning. It refuses one way in all the ways I can read it.

Poetry Lunch reading series

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