Marilyn Gates
The tense lines of Zoë Hitzig’s “Bounded Regret Algorithm” constellate into a bustling microcosm of poetic power. I love how sound play renders the poem’s most affecting revelations even more charged: “Eventually I learn to limit / the loss.” Nearly a year later, the ending image still floors me, that “unclosed hand / against a cold bedroom window” in—wonder? Despair? Clearly, ineffably, it’s both. “spreadsheets,” the embodiment of digital order, “seizure / like cities.” Functions “compile just fine,” despite being “Undefined.” The speaker may well be Pandora, all the complications of her catalogued boxes. Then again, unlike the latter, the former runs a tight ship (or plane), slams shut even hermetically sealed trunks. This is why I’m so drawn to her “unclosed hand”—its gentle speculation, its tentative openness, its half-risk, touching an approximation of the cold, full world.
Read Zoe Hitzig’s poem, “Bounded Regret Algorithm”
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Arushi Sheth
I picked this poem because I’ve always found nature poems interesting, but this one completely changed my perspective and was nothing like I expected. The imagery shifts from landscapes to towns, illustrating communication and memory are unstable, creating a narrative of destruction and fragility. The use of surreal and even violent imagery against mundane words such as billboards and orchards creates a tension between chaos and order. The poem’s imagery and meaning, especially the idea that reality does not stay stable, feels true in our world today, where media and the political climate shape what we think of as “stable” even though much of it is partly imagined.
Read Shane Book’s poem, “Not a Violation of the Laws of Nature but a Rare Occurrence”
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Antonia Matthew
This poem, set in a kitchen on an ordinary morning, begins with the trite remark, “live each day as if it were my last” by “you.” The poet “before coffee” has complained of the “obstacle race” of the day ahead. But she responds, “why the last? Why not…the first?” Now Eve’s in the kitchen, “rubbing her eyes awake that first morning,” and we meet the “you,” grinding coffee “with the small roar of a mind,” who has no response. But the poet moves into the day, and sees “where the dew has baptized every/living surface” making it newborn.
Then I read the title again. “Imaginary Conversation.” On this obstacle race of a day could the poet be conversing with herself? Be the perplexed grinder of coffee and the discoverer of the newborn day? I love the straightforwardness and the ambiguity.
Ruth Hoberman
I loved this poem at first because it felt familiar to me. This is how a long marriage feels when it’s going well: the easy back and forth of a couple whose love is sustained by small acts of care (“You grind the coffee/with the small roar of a mind/trying to clear itself”) and by conversation—in this case, discussing how, exactly, one can survive “that obstacle race/of minutes and hours.”
Live each day as the hackneyed “last”? Or, as the speaker suggests, the first—like prelapsarian Eve, all “raw astonishment”?
Then, I remembered the title. Did this even happen? Traditionally, an “imaginary conversation” is with a dead person. So the cliché isn’t such a cliché; it’s advice from someone who’s actually lived a last day. And the poem doesn’t depict a routine breakfast with a loved partner; it’s a flourish marking an absence. The world looks different, more complicated and also more beautiful, in its light.
Read Linda Pastan’s poem, ”Imaginary Conversation”
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Alice M.
I’ve read Poetry Daily for several years now and one of my all-time favorites is Natasha Ramatour’s “The Oracle Delivers Your Pizza.” The way it contrasts the mundanity of pizza delivery and socks lost in the dryer with the epic language of Greek drama is a playful delight. This is a poem that begs to be read out-loud, in your best impression of the Oracle at Delphi.
When it was published by Poetry Daily, I was sitting next to my mother, tending to her following the surgery to remove the brain tumor that will eventually kill her. One of our family traditions growing up was to order pizza every Friday night. I read it out loud to her, giving us a moment of joy, during those frightening, precious weeks.
In our lives, even in the hardest of times, mundane rituals (and poetry) offer comfort and solace. Poetry at its best puts into words what those of us non-poets struggle to express about the profound.
“In your fiercest battle, your greatest trial from the Gods themselves, someone will cradle your hand and insist it will be okay. It will be okay.”
And it will be okay. Ramatour’s poem reminds me of that, all with language that is comedic and possesses an irresistible cadence.
Catherine Coyles
The thing that makes “The Oracle Delivers Your Pizza” by Natasha Ramoutar so delightful is the perfect marriage of modern imagery and ancient Greek motifs. The fortune the Oracle delivers along with the pizza quells a different kind of hunger, but one no less potent. Cosmic reassurances are offered alongside pizza specials, the price of laundry alongside godly trials. The joy of this poem is found in the minute details woven into the larger fabric of this tapestry, like how the Oracle knows exactly how you will pay for your pizza because, of course, she’s the Oracle.
Read Natasha Ramatour’s poem, ”The Oracle Delivers Your Pizza”
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Shalini Gupta
The poem is a metaphor of metaphors on a life lived introspectively. It holds a mirror to our own lives, how perspective defines it, how arrogance holds back, how realisation dawns, how we start light, but end up heavy. In a world with fixed rules and regulations, what enters us, does not leave as it does. Not only does it change, it also changes something within us. Leaving each one of us a library of sorts, for anyone who cares to read.
Read Lisa Well’s poem, ”13”
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