“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

Everyone has his or her own idea of what poetry is. In Poets Unbound you have fifteen perspectives. Whether your taste runs to formal rhyming poems, imagistic depictions of feeling, or the no-frills language of the everyday, there is something here for you. There are poems celebrating life, poems of mourning, nature poems, city poems, poems about mythology and popular culture, animals, God, and mankind. This collection is as diverse as its authors, but whatever the differences, the poems are united by the shared value that poetry is not only important but necessary. Every poet in this book has handed copies of his/her poems around a table to half a dozen people with editing pens to ask, "how could this poem be better?" Every poet in this book has left a meeting feeling sorry that he/she asked, and come back the next week to hear more, trusting that a poem important enough to write, is important enough to craft. Poets Unbound contains many styles, subjects, and viewpoints. Most of all, it contains the distinct voices of people who believe poetry a vital way to communicate the individual world.

From dissonant hearts to drive-thru burgers, Poets Unbound: 10 Years into the Journey is a thematically organized anthology of poetry by the members of Poets Unbound, the Nashua, NH workshop group that's been meeting every Thursday since 1996. The first section, Dark Alleys, consists of poems that visit the darker places. Not a depressing look, rather the poems find beauty and hope in life's challenges. Stops Along the Way is a look into all the places we've traveled in life, the past. These poems provide insight into the things that shape who we are. Scenic Routes is a picturesque look at landscapes of all kinds, pastoral, urban, internal, and metaphorical. Love's Byways is about all kinds of love: mother-child, sibling and other family relationships, romantic relationships, requited and unrequited loves. Sign-Posts is a potpourri of perspectives on life. These perspectives include personal beliefs, spiritual beliefs, and other philosophies. Whether it's because these poets have spent time helping one another improve their craft, or synchronicity, the poems in this anthology have incredible flow. In each section you'll find that from one poem to the next, the poems inform and deepen one another. This anthology is a journey you'll want to revisit again and again.

It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry’s audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry’s ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry’s surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry’s still evolving place in American culture.

A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and esteemed author of The Liar’s Club and Lit. Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous—that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power—illness, death, love’s agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you’re an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness.

Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, he follows poetry's travels off the page into new media formats.

Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems.