A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now.

My first encounter with Amanda Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar” was through Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó’Tuama, not long after I read his bread recipe-poem and reflections on soup. Poems and recipes are kindred spirits, both in form and function. And, as Anthony Bourdain writes in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency” is a vital, fundamental skill. Perhaps the same is true of poetr

When I read “The First Water Is the Body” in 2020, after Natalie Diaz’s book, Postcolonial Love Poem (in which the poem appears), won the Pulitzer Prize, my consciousness felt diverted like a river around a boulder. I struggled to grasp another poem as this one settled, alive, into my body. Perhaps it didn’t settle at all, like the settler I am in Canada. The poem helped me remember the river that I, too, already am.

I’ve loved Andrea Gibson’s work for years, and was heartbroken when they passed away not long ago. I’ll always recommend spending time with my favourite poem of theirs, “What Love Is.” But today, honouring the ways the world is raising awareness about cancer throughout April and May, we’re looking at “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.”

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.