Poem | First Covid-19 Summer
Some of us are lucky. We can swim in a lake. We can walk on a dirt road.
Poem | I Hold my Breath
1.
I keep calling up Weather to ask
if it’s going to rain, though I’m standing
at the window and can see
the staccato drops already falling.
We were to...
Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Jewish-American Poet Louise Glück
This week's announcement that Jewish-American writer Louise Glück has received the Nobel Prize in Literature is cause for celebration during a decidedly difficult season. Glück, who is widely regarded as one of the most gifted lyrical poets of our time, is the first American woman poet ever to have received this honor.
Poem | At One
The English word atonement sounds abstract / And kind of Latin, but really it’s just “at one.”
Poem | Double Rainbow
Yesterday someone robbed me, and today, / an afternoon of rain brings a double rainbow.
Poem | Afikomen
I’ve written the soup, the parting of the sea, the savage plagues and the candles
Poem | [From “The Naomi Letters”] January 23, 2017
There is another version of the story in which we survive nothing by accident.
Beshert | Bonded by the Bard
“Was that your friend Bill Shakespeare?” my youngest son, Alex, then six, asks after my husband, Steve, hangs up the phone.
If that seems like a crazy question from a child, it was par for the course in my household, because it was words that wooed me, words that won me, and words that keep us – the entire family – in thrall.
From the very beginning, in fact.
Poem | A Little Girl’s 1930s Dirge
“Turn off your lights! / Turn them off! / Heh heh heh,” the radio coughs. / The Olga Coal Company presents
Poem | A Jew in 2019
No matter how many generations / our forebears lived in a country / we are always seen by many / as those who can’t belong
At Home With Marge Piercy
Marge Piercy doesn’t live that far off the beaten track—it’s only Cape Cod, after all—but it feels remote, especially in the off-season. The poet, novelist and longtime feminist activist, who’s now 83, has lived in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, since the 1970s.
Judith Viorst Talks Nearing 90
At 88 years old, Viorst doesn’t fail to remind us how fiercely funny she is in her appropriately titled poetry collection: Nearing 90 and Other Comedies of Late Life.