| cities as fathers | (excerpt)

I hold your name. My patronymic. It holds me.
olga mikolaivna
from the book | cities as fathers | / Tilted House

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.

In Books We’ve Loved, we’ve asked our editorial board members and select guest editors to reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year, with the intention of creating a list of book recommendations for our valued readers.

Henri Cole on James Longenbach's "In the Village"
Photo: Henri Cole
James Longenbach
Shortly before I died, Or possibly after, I moved to a small village by the sea.
Saúl Hernández
When a winter storm hit Texas, the bluebonnet field sounded like glass.
Margaret Ross
I smelled the corpses on my fingers when I took my smoke break
DeeSoul Carson
A visual poem by DeeSoul Carson
Rick Barot
You are told to believe in one paradise and then there is the paradise you come to know.

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Each member of our diverse board selects poems for our daily poem feature and works with us to identify new outstanding, interesting publications for our thousands of daily readers.