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.

We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

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?

We’re pleased to offer Carmen Giménez’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

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?

We’re pleased to offer Rick Barot’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

“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?

We’re pleased to offer Diannely Antigua’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

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.

We’re pleased to offer Don McKay’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

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.

We’re pleased to offer Jonathan Cohen’s translation of Ernesto Cardenal’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

Many people say their experience of time changes after they have children, a phenomenon that Diego Báez captures in “Inheritance.” In this poem, a past, present, and future starring the same child shift ceaselessly in a parent’s mind, like photos flipped through in an album, dots placed on a timeline, moments that one wishes they could build monuments for.

We’re pleased to offer Diego Báez’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

Wonder and strangeness commingle with the commonplace and universal in Danielle Chapman’s “Trespassing with Tweens.” In a not-quite mirroring, a human mother and her children stand and watch together in awe as a great blue heron flaps in and feeds its two offspring. The pleasures found here are profound and multiple – the joys in seeing, in sharing an experience of seeing, in seeing with fresh eyes, and in being seen.

We’re pleased to offer Danielle Chapman’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

In Richard Langston’s poem “Hill walk,” he proffers a handful of things that move us over the course of a day — words said or read, notes played, the sight of halting steps taken by a sibling. We marvel at the sound of an unfamiliar bird call, but there’s a startling mystery to the human heart and what it responds to (or doesn’t) and one that we don’t always mark.

We’re pleased to offer Richard Langston’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there — a precursor to violence that has become all too familiar in American life in the intervening years. And she was an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to all — at home in her body and in the world, even while she saw and exulted in the beyond of this tumultuous age of her lifetime.

What sacrifices were made by your parents when you were a child? How did you think about them as they were happening? And how do you think about them now? In his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden holds space for a weighted childhood memory and the regret, love, and pain it evokes.

We’re pleased to offer Robert Hayden’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

When you look at people who are younger than you — particularly teenagers — does your mind ever take you back to yourself at their age? Taylor Johnson’s poem “Pennsylvania Ave. SE” performs this feat of time travel, going from a glimpse of two boys on bicycles to a haunting sense memory of what was once so yearned for: to be seen, to be wanted, to be free.

We’re pleased to offer Taylor Johnson’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

In Kinsale Drake’s poem “Put on that KTNN,” she writes about driving to a hometown as a familiar station crackles to life on the car radio. From this corner of America, she creates her own country music — of Navajo voices alongside Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, of drumbeats and guitar licks, of things wrought by nature and things made by humans, all of them rooted in the desert sand.

We’re pleased to offer Kinsale Drake’s poem and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and songs and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer-songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also reentering the public imagination with a big new movie. And her classic heartbreak hit about him, “Diamonds and Rust,” is topping global charts anew.

But Joan Baez at 83 is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend. She grew up the daughter of a Mexican physicist father and a Scottish mother in a seemingly idyllic family. But even at the height of her fame, she was struggling mightily with mysterious interior demons. She and her beloved sisters finally reckoned in midlife with a truth of abuse they had buried, even in memory, at great cost. She has reckoned with fracture inside herself and been on an odyssey of wholeness. She is frank and funny, irreverent and wise. Among other gifts, she offers a refreshing way in to what it means to sing and live the reality of “overcoming,” personal and civilizational.

Krista spoke with Joan — who has recently published her first book of poetry — on stage at the 2024 Chicago Humanities Festival.

Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama is back on Monday, December 2. Featured poets in this season include Robert Hayden, Kinsale Drake, Danielle Chapman, Diannely Antigua, and many more. New episodes every week through March 3.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast, or wherever you listen.

The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called “live human signposts” — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of “pleasure activism” and “emergent strategy,” is surely one of these.

We’re listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living.

We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of this last time of life. Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude.

Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope, sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allowed for this measure of care. Yet it also includes very actionable encouragement towards the agency that is there to claim in our mortal odysseys ahead.

We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us.

The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. In his writing and in this conversation, he complicates every dehumanizing stereotype of Mexicans, “migrants” — and border guards. A deep truth of our time, Luis insists, is that “we miss each other.” He offers a vision of the larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today: that we might evolve the old illusion of the melting pot into a 21st-century richness of “us.” And he delightfully models that messiness and humor will be required.