Leila Chatti, “I Went Out to Hear”
From Wildness Before Something Sublime
(Copper Canyon Press, 2025)
Chosen by Eric Pankey
Leila Chatti’s poem “I Went Out to Hear” surrounds with language its moment (in this case, “a perfect moment”) of perception, stilling it, capturing it just long enough for us to perceive it in its passing, in its strange and evocative vanishing. This lyric poem, like lyric poetry generally, mourns the passage of time, laments the lateness by which time is recollected, the “hurt” of that remembering, that memorializing.
One thing I love about Poetry Daily, year in and out, is coming upon poems I might have otherwise missed, finding poets I want to read more of, finding myself surprised each day, blessed by the wealth of poetry and, as Chatti says in her poem, “to have lived/ a life I would die for.” Read the poem.
*****
Samyak Shertok, “The Last Himalayan Beekeeper”
From No Rhododendron
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025)
Chosen by Dana Levin
Samyak Shertok’s “The Last Himalayan Beekeeper” comes from his striking debut NO RHODODENDRON. The book is a deeply moving chronicle of loss of homeland and parents; it is also formally inventive and surprising: Shertok marries the ghazal and sonnet, the ghazal and haibun; he evokes the upward movement of the spirit leaving burial grounds in a sonnet crown where each poem moves from bottom to top. These inventions are deeply felt, evoking the disorientation of walking the bardos of historical and personal change. And everywhere in this book you will find images vivid and strange as dreams, as in this poem: bees in the windpipe, the mouth a hive, honey and wound, a world falling into ghost, but for the accomplishment of Shertok’s gift. Read the poem.
*****
Oluwaseun Olayiwola, “Night on the Thames Path”
From Strange Beach
(Soft Skull Press, 2025)
Chosen by Peter Streckfus
What I love most of all of this reading of Poetry Daily, of what it gifts me, is voices I’ve not yet heard, who I hear first here. I initially encountered the London-based poet, critic, choreographer, and performer Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s work in Poetry London‘s Summer 2024 issue, from which we selected his poem “Crustacean,“ featuring it almost exactly a year ago. And then, just a few weeks ago, his “Night on the Thames Path,“ from his book Strange Beach appeared on the site. I am in awe of his ability to rename the world. Read the poem.
*****
Xin Qiji, “37 The Faint Peal of Thunder”
Translated from the Chinese by Red Pine
From If a Mountain Lion Could Sing: The Lyric Poems of Xin Qiji
(Copper Canyon Press, 2025)
Chosen by Jennifer Atkinson
In the middle of a year of floods, fires, and grief, this ancient poem arrived in our inboxes like a lost letter, forwarded and re-forwarded, poet to poet to reader to translator to us now a thousand years later. Each of its first 4 lines is its own single act of attention inviting us one by one to take it slow, to share the original poet’s experience of a storm from the first warning of distant thunder to hard rain and storm winds that destroy the plum blossoms of early spring, releasing their scent like a jar of honey smashed against the wall.
But then in the fifth line, we learn that this storm is not just one beautiful, destructive storm but the first in a series of such storms, viewed, it seems, from above and apart. One afternoon’s rain becomes a great flood that destroys more than blossoms and cuts the poet off from those suffering below. I imagine him watching whole towns washed away as we have watched on tv as forests burn to the ground and rivers sweep off houses and cars. Helpless, like him we are cut off from the suffering and, too often, from particular loved ones we might share our grief and horror with. The isolation that was a contemplative distance has become a painful apartness, and we feel, poet and readers all, an estranged cut-off compassion and grief. (I’m reminded of W.S. Merwin’s perfect “Elegy”–“Who would I send it to”) Evidently, Xin Qiji has sent it, his poem, to us and we’ve received it 1000 years later and right on time. Read the poem.
*****
Katrine Øgaard Jensen, “Rule: Now rewrite from the perspective of the woman in the chair of Peter Blume’s 1932 painting Light of the World”
From Ancient Algorithms
(Sarabande Books, 2025)
Chosen by Heather Green
Among the many gems and wonders among this year’s Poetry Daily offerings; I was particularly moved and inspired by Ishion Hutchinson’s “The War Mule’s Account,” Jack Saebyok Jung’s “Nurse II,” and Bernadette Mayer’s “Essay,” all of which range from the allusive to the intertextual, and by poet-translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s “Rule: Now rewrite from the perspective of the woman in the chair of Peter Blume’s 1932 painting Light of the World,” which takes this intertextuality to a new height, in its rumbustious “mistranslation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen.”
After completing a translation of a trilogy of Olsens’s poetry collections, ending with My Jewel Box (Action Books, 2022), Jensen collaborated with Olsen and several other writers to extend her engagement with the work through “mistranslations,” imitations, and other rhizomatic expansions of the text into English, publishing this work in Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande, 2025). This poem appears in the section Jensen wrote in correspondence with Sawako Nakayasu, whose Mouth Eats Color (Rogue Factorial, 2011) inspired the volume.
Jensen’s titular prompt draws another work into the mix, a surreal, dazzling painting by Peter Blume. Although of course there aren’t 1:1 relationship is between the lines in Olsen’s original English translation and this poem, there are mutating echoes as the painting’s particulars enter the poem: “i place the body inside the world / and breathe in” becomes “i place the world inside the light and look.” Both poetry and translation have the power to reenergize our language, to remind us to “worship [or write] in technicolor,” and this poem, with its wild neologisms (“windchains sunwreaths coalbonds”) and humor (describing Blume’s seated man and ventriloquist’s dummy as “my despairbody chairbuddy”), make me feel both the charge and the pull of linguistic possibility. Read the poem.
*****
Ken Bluford, “COVID Roadshow”
From Skip Tracing
(Wry Awry, 2024)
Chosen by Vivek Narayanan
Ken Bluford published a first full-length collection of poems last year at the age of seventy-five that established him for some of us as a modern master. Don’t be fooled by the rhyming quatrains: Skip Tracing is a beguiling, tender, cutting and thoroughly unpredictable collection, casually erudite, drenched in the shifting waters of memory, sometimes deadly serious, often very zany, that surfaces a real link between the New York School and the Black avant garde. Read the poem.
*****
Sayumi Kamakura, [On a green summer night,]
Translated from the Japanese by James Shea
From Applause for a Cloud
(Black Ocean, 2025)
Chosen by Sandra Lim
I love how this haiku steeps in the mind and makes green, summer, night, horse, glass, neighs, and distance bloom and interconnect, giving us tastes of tranquility, longing, and freshness. Its spareness feels like richness and dimension; I can now attend to the effects of green, of glass. Color is the language of dreams, according to Cézanne. And like a dream, this unhurried poem does its work swiftly and gets out fast. Read the poem.
*****
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, “Under the Bodhi Tree”
From The Color of Peace
(Black Ocean, 2025)
Chosen by Mary-Alice Daniel
If asked what I’m writing these days, I cite love poems. When asked what now I control, I say still nothing. Daily, I do not know how we aren’t all walking around screaming. Poems I’ve loved this year steer the way away from the Void by veering directly towards it — insisting one is not afraid. To then not be afraid. I am afraid of what is; I am afraid of what else. I take a breath. I self-soothe; I stay easy. I lull Self, steady. Cosmoses rock out of order. How must a body proceed? Just as one lover waits placidly under the Bodhi Tree—at the verge of Oblivion & Null. Go sweet & slow: “love is honey.” Enter chaos calmly. Inching. With ease. Without urgency. Admit unknowns. Trust the unready. Any unstable state/untenable entity. Slide your whole hand into this Abyss; put your full heart into the inferno of another human heart. Keep still. Lovers will be late; you’ll grow lonely. So be. Out of true blue, to you Someone comes. Rumi wrote: “There is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Field of fig tree and flower; field of ficus leaf; one opening goldfield of Unfear. If asked the point of poetry, say: spearpoint. Asked its purpose, say: shade. Though foolish, no, lovers are not afraid— Read the poem.
*****
Susan Howe, “Chipping Sparrow”
Poetry Magazine, September, 2025
Chosen by Susan Tichy
Chipping sparrow, impossibly light. To comment feels like loading the poem with a kind of baggage. Susan Howe’s spare, short-line lyrics evade. The poem lies on the white page, an arrangement of bare sticks and bright stones, riven and ribboned by their own histories. What I seek in them lies somewhere between a meditation and a divination—as the one retreats toward mind, the other stays rough to the touch. In our ordinary world of loss and continuing, some things are irreducible. Chipping sparrow, the simplest of visitations. Read the poem.
