In 1971, Nikki Giovanni spoke with James Baldwin at length in A Dialogue (also released as a book). When I first read it, not long after she passed away in December 2024, the texture and resonance of her voice felt like double-sided sticky tape. It hasn’t left me, and sticks to what I read now. Her conviction is unparalleled not only in its power but in its grace; grace as in its dexterity of love. And for that reason alone, I struggled to choose just one poem for this essay.

Terrance Hayes is one of my favourite poets, with a long list of collections, awards, and fellowships which you can explore here. He is known to invent formal constraints, and often writes on themes of music, masculinity, popular culture, and race. His breathtaking poem, “The Same City,” is no different.

The brilliance of Justene Dion-Glowa’s poem shines through their use of white space on the page, which is one of my favourite craft tools in poetry. In “half-blood”, space—including caesuras, stanza breaks, line breaks, and indents, for example—works as hard as words, enacting the feeling of being ‘halved’ alongside a sort of sinister whiteness.

A deep dive into "The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza" by Tishani Doshi

A deep dive into "Meditations in an Emergency" by Cameron Awkward-Rich

A deep dive into Lorna Goodison’s poem, “This is a Hymn." Lorna Goodison is a Caribbean poet born in Kingston, Jamaica. She has published several award-winning books of poetry, among many other writings. A painter before becoming a poet, her poems are saturated with imagery, laughter, and commentary about social life in Jamaica. She is a thoughtful, empathetic observer of nature and people, writing about human failures, triumphs, cruelties, and kindnesses with stunning langua

A deep dive into Emily Pauline Johnson’s poem, “The Marshlands". Johnson was born and raised on Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, and often published under her grandfather’s name, Tekahionwake (“double wampum”). Her work—in publication and on the stage—often braided English storytelling/poetic structure with Indigenous beliefs and storytelling...

The English word “poetry” comes from the Greek word poieo, which translates to “I create/make.” The word “lyric” is descended from the lyre, a stringed instrument the Greeks played alongside reciting poetry. The lyric poem is linked to Sanskrit hymns and is the form many of the poets mentioned earlier wrote in, such as the sonnet.