Poetry Unbound

Will you leave this episode feeling uplifted, envious, curious, or something else entirely? Yes. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poem “Subarctica” transports you to a vividly specific time — “the coldest December / on record, I haven’t left my mother’s / house in over a week” — where the primary view is of poplars in “a tiny schoolyard”. Amid the simplicity and snow, the speaker shifts their perspective, seeing beyond their past and towards the wonder in their present and in what is to come. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is the author of six books, including the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning debut This Wound Is a World. Belcourt serves as the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production at the University of British Columbia and also edits poetry for Hazlitt.

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Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s delicious and dexterous “Carne” begins with these lines: “I've eaten pork from / pernil to chuletas to chitterlings.” And just in case you were wondering — and even if you’re not — the speaker goes on to list much more of the seafood, poultry, and animal parts that have been consumed and how they were cooked. Lest you think this poem is simply a meat-eater’s manifesto, savor its final turn towards what else the speaker is really hungry for. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s first collection of poetry, The Strange House Testifies, was published by Bilingual Review Press. Her second collection, Beasts Behave in Foreign Land, received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Prize. She is a Dodge Poet, a CantoMundo Fellow, and holds an MFA in poetry from NYU. She works as a high school English teacher in New Jersey. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Loving in the face of violence, danger, and distress is an act of defiance, as demonstrated in Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s achingly beautiful poem “Dukka”.  The Palestinian American writer spotlights seven aspects of love in action — between father and newborn, for example, a journalist and her audience, a pair of intimates dining out. She shows us the “million ways to love” flowing through her community and cascading through generations, centuries, millennia, as inexorable and constant as the ocean and as bright and surprising as a rare meteor shower. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (The University of Akron Press, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen Press), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention of the 2018 Arab American Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, and Letters from the Interior, finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Rachel Mann’s “#TDOR” manages to turn a depiction of one side of a conversation about marking Trans Day of Remembrance into a poem that is both empathic and uncompromising. Mann captures the verbal stammers and stumbles of the well-meaning but leaves us to reckon whether the words land as mirror, mockery, or cry for action. 

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Rachel Mann is a priest, writer, and broadcaster. She is the author of 13 books, including her debut poetry collection, A Kingdom of Love, and the acclaimed nonfiction, Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory, and God. She is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Manchester Writing School and broadcasts regularly, including as a contributor to Thought For The Day. 

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Sanah Ahsan’s evocative “Ramadan’s Greeting” brings us into the thoughts and experiences of a person observing the holiest month in Islam. In nine brief couplets, the poet deftly directs our attention towards some of the rich contrasts that emerge at this time — between light and dark, desire and abstinence, self and community — as well as the abiding satisfactions and joys. 
We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  
Sanah Ahsan is a poet, liberation psychologist, and educator. Sanah’s work plays in the wild terrain of woundedness, the sacred landscapes of falling apart, centering compassion and embracing each other's madness. Their work draws on therapeutics, psychospirituality, embodiment, and poetics as life-affirming practices. Some of Sanah’s media work includes writing for The Guardian, delivering a TEDx Talk, and presenting a Channel 4 documentary on the overmedicalization of people’s distress. Sanah is working on a nonfiction book about the politics of distress, and society’s relationship with unruly emotions. As a poet, Sanah won the Out-Spoken Poetry Performance Prize and has been shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The White Review Poetry Prize, and Bridport Poetry Prize. Sanah’s debut poetry collection, I cannot be good until you say it, is a meditation on Islam, queerness, and goodness. It was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection and Polari Prize, and selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books.
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