My best strategy for combatting overwork over the last six months has been reading poetry first thing before I migrate to my desk. Here are some of the poems that most inspired me.

‘September 8, 2017’ by Kerry Greer

Like Judas to himself / He took a piece of paper, / Lit it at the gas stove, / Then lay down to die / Bleeding from his heart, / Not figuratively. / In real life. // The piece of paper said things like: / Tomatoes, milk, oolong tea, hand soap. / It was normal life / Going up in flames.

Kerry Greer is a Western Australian poet and writer. She received the Venie Holmgren Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021. Her poetry manuscript was recently longlisted for the Publishable program, run by Queensland Writers’ Centre. She was shortlisted for the ABR Calibre Prize, the Stuart Hadow Short Story Prize, and the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize during 2021. ‘September 8, 2017’ was highly commended in the Poetry d’Amour competition in 2021.

‘Romantics’ by Lisel Mueller

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers ask / the rude, irrelevant question / of our age, as if the event / of two bodies meshing together / establishes the degree of love, / forgetting how softly Eros walked / in the nineteenth-century, how a hand / held overlong or a gaze anchored / in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart

Lisel Mueller’s collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection; Second Language (1986); The Need to Hold Still (1980), which received the National Book Award; Learning to Play by Ear (1990); and Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize. She lived in Lake Forest, Illinois for many years before her death in 2020.

‘Afterthoughts on the Lovers’ by Lisel Mueller

I imagine them always in summer, / with roses running a loose-lipped hazard / around their book, as butterflies / poised in the net of noon: / I think of her silent, wholly brought / under siege by his voice, staring

Read Lisel Mueller’s bio (above) in the previous entry.

‘our own names’ by Destiny Hemphill

at the shore of our oil-shined flesh. listen: / this is my oath to you. i’m devoted // to you, the people, my folks, my kindred— / not to the state. & i belong with you— / not to the state. our love is ordained // by the Black ordinary & spectacle, / our wayward waymaking.

Destiny Hemphill is the author of motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life (Action Books, 2023). The recipient of fellowships from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, Callaloo, Tin House, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.

‘Memoir of water’ by Esther Ottaway

Swimming with friends last summer, our bodies / larger with age, remade into / squealing children. / Floating in night’s bay as the fireworks / scribbled joy on a black sky, black rippled waves.

Esther Ottaway is an award-winning Australian poet who was shortlisted in the world’s largest poetry prize, the Montreal International, in 2020. Her poetry features in the noted anthology Thirty Australian Poets and in leading newspapers, literary journals and anthologies. Her two books are Blood Universe: poems on pregnancy and Intimate, Low-voiced, Delicate Things. Esther’s work is online at https://esther-ottaway-poet.jimdosite.com.

‘Cabin’ by Anne Waldman

I tell you about renunciation, I tell you holy / isolation like a river nears ocean dissolve // and cabin becomes someone’s idea of a good place / discretion you pay for it wasn’t mine either / but sits on me imprints on me // forever splendour of fog, snow shut strangers out / gradual turn of season, ground stir, pine / needle tickle your shoulder, peak curve, fresh air.

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics, Anne Waldman is an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, and has been connected to the Beat movement and the second generation of the New York School. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997), and Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (2016).

‘small talk or in my hand galaxies’ by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

i say i am maybe a writer / me too she beams and offers a full palm / of what she’d vacuumed from the doorframe / shattered glass beads of blue refraction / wonder she says wonder at all they have / seen she insists ver towards the tiny eyelets / en mi mano galaxias she says and i wonder

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. He is the author of Dēmos (Milkweed 2021), Colonize Me (Saturnalia 2019), and Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot (University of Nebraska Press 2018). Naka-Hasebe Kingsley is an assistant professor of English at Kalamazoo College.

‘Gentle or Not’ by Laura Cresté

When it finally / rains, the house shakes with thunder, wine // glasses chatter coldly and moss on the trees / brightens like wet velvet. I think I’m all / right but in dreams my teeth shatter.

Laura Cresté is the author of the chapbook You Should Feel Bad, which won a Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from New York University and received a 2021-22 fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

‘A toast to something beautiful flapping in the wind’ by J. Hope Stein

To something beautiful flapping in the wind above / The beach houses—A blue bird?—No, a blue bag. // To her breath— raindrops in the begonia bed. / My eyesight is rainstorms. // Drop. //drop—

J. Hope Stein is a poet whose work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker and on Broadway. She lives in New York.

‘Learning about Constellations’ by Saddiq Dzukogi

Today Baha is not dead; she is twelve years old, / sits beside a flower vase, presses her thumb to the clay. / Her heart buds into a magnificent sun, / waterfalls its warmth all over her satin face.

Saddiq Dzukogi is a poet and professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), and winner of the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Dzukogi is completing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. ‘Learning about Constellations’ is from Your Crib, My Qibla. And Saddiq Dzukogi, wrote this book in response to the death of his daughter, Baha, just 21 days after her first birthday.

‘I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move’ by Louise Erdrich

We watched from the house / as the river grew, helpless / and terrible in its unfamiliar body. / Wrestling everything into it, / the water wrapped around trees / until their life-hold was broken.

Louise Erdrich has written numerous award-winning novels and short story collections and published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Jacklight (1984), Baptism of Desire (1989) and Original Fire: New and Selected Poems (2003).

‘Twice in Two Days: Neptune, Ohio’ by Alyssa Jewell

and I shied away into a wall of bread to imagine / what it would be like to fade under all that fluorescence— // the store clerk wielding a mop to paint water around your tremors, / a few paramedics, and a handful of women clutching // grocery lists like rosaries as if they too might turn away / or look intently on as your body shakes up toward God.

Alyssa Jewell edits poetry for Waxwing as well as Third Coast and coordinates the Poets in Print reading series in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Witness, Virginia Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other publications. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where she teaches ESL and creative writing classes.

‘Knot Work / Not Work / Knot Hole / Not Whole: A Mapping / Jishin-no-ben’ by Lee Ann Roripaugh

You think of how clever her hands / used to be: deftly recuperating dropped stitches // in her knitting, untangling snarled thread in her lace / crochet. You imagine the sticky knots of plaque // blotting out words like dropped stitches in her brain, / her troubled neurons a snarl of neurofibrillary tangles. 

Lee Ann Roripaugh is an American poet and was the South Dakota poet laureate  from 2015 to 2019. Roripaugh is the author of five volumes of poetry: tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), Dandarians (Milkweed, Editions, 2014), On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), and Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin, 1999). Roripaugh is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.

‘Mama Cockroach, I Love You’ by Fiona Benson

Because you would leave your body for your offspring / to dine upon — all the liquors and gravy // of the obscene world, your work in the crannies / delivered to the living. Because you are, // despite all rumours, mortal.

Fiona Benson was born in Wiltshire, England, and she earned her MLitt and PhD from the University of St Andrews. She is the author of the poetry collections Vertigo and Ghost (Cape, 2019), which received the Forward Prize for Best Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Bright Travellers (Cape, 2014), which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for a First Full Collection, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2018 Benson’s poem “Ruins,” included in Vertigo and Ghost, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She also received the Eric Gregory Award, from the Society of Authors, in 2006. Benson lives in Devon, England with her husband and their two daughters.

Green Prawn Map by Robert Adamson — in memory of his grandfather H.T. Adamson

Morning before sunrise, sheets of dark air / hang from nowhere in the sky. / No stars there, only here is river. // His line threads through a berley trail, / a thread his life. There’s no wind / in the world and darkness is a smell alive

Robert Adamson (1943–2022) was one of Australia’s most important poets. He was born in Sydney and grew up in Neutral Bay and on the Hawkesbury River, New South Wales. During a tumultuous youth, he found his way to poetry, and over five subsequent decades he produced over 20 books of poetry and three books of prose. His work has been published internationally with Reading the River: Selected Poems (2004), The Kingfisher’s Soul (2009) and Net Needle (2016) in the UK and most recently, Reaching Light: Selected Poems was published by Flood Editions in the USA and released in Australia in 2020. ‘Green Prawn Map’ is from Mulberry Leaves: New and Selected Poems.