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 “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.

Poetry Lunch reading series

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