Poetry Lunch
Informal poetry reading series with Myrna Keliher, live on Instagram @expeditionpress and archived here. Also! Here's a booklist on bookshop.org, so you can buy them and read them!
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.