Horrible to watch, but don’t let anyone tell you this wasn’t murder. See w your own eyes

Today our newsletter readers received two poems from our Winter 2026 issue by Anna Lena Phillips Bells. These took second place in our annual Pablo Neruda contest, judged by @randallmann.bsky.social and are featured in the poet’s new Anthony Hecht Prize-winning collection, MIGHT COULD.

Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026

President Trump has ended a 9th war—between Denmark and the United States—which all but guarantees his second Nobel Peace Prize. by Hugh Hewitt

This is heartbreaking. This should be all over the news. The EVIL of this administration—i have no words.

Love the turns in this one.

My mother sent me this to cheer me up. It’s for the steam release on my instant pot ( she also sent one to my grandmother) 🤣

Stop what you’re doing and read this whistleblower report. ICE has been training its agents that they don’t need a judicial warrant to break down your door - a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment. www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

🗣️ reminder!!! 🗣️ FREE SUBMISSIONS CURRENTLY OPEN to be our Poet of the Week! 💙 pop onto our website for more info and to submit! ✨

If you like poetry, and you’re also interested in discussion about the history of gynecological medicine and intersections with racism, I think this book is for you. published in 2013, but as relevant as ever. The maternal mortality rates in the US are abysmal, especially for Black women….

I was not planning to finish this tonight, but I couldn’t stop reading. A student of mine gifted this to me last spring and I finally had a chance to pick it up over break. What an accomplishment! Gorgeous and addictive. Highly recommend if you’ve not already read it (was published in 2017).

If you pause to listen to any posted video tonight, let it be this one. You will feel some measure of hope, and at this point I think most of us will be grateful for even the smallest teaspoon.

Just home from a poetry reading where the state of the world was a ubiquitous theme. Fitting poem.

Excellent feminist review and analysis of female iconocity as it relates to the pop culture machine that is “Britney Spears.” But also a poignant discussion of the ways media, consumerism, and law have been gleefully stacked against girls and women— readily & tragically dehumanized.

🤣🤣

I hate this. 🗣️FUCK #ICE

Let’s goooooooo

NEW: Jonathan Ross, the ICE thug who murdered Renee Good, was NOT TAKEN TO THE HOSPITAL according to police reports. He was taken to the Federal Building. He was NOT INJURED. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

ICE Agents enter Target with no warrant and violently tackle two American citizen employees, evidently because they didn't "look American" enough. (DHS refused to explain their rationale, so we have to guess.) The injured Americans were later dumped in parking lots miles away in sub-zero weather.

my dad hung up on me when I said “fuck” a year ago in April and I haven’t talked to him since. And I don’t give a shit.

I know people on Bsky know this but I hope it filters out: The feds are OCCUPYING the Twin Cities. This is a blockade, a siege. They are shutting down economic and civic activity. They are conducting "papers please" stops. They are criminalizing being a bystander/witness. You could be next.

#rockcod (Lindbergichthys nudifrons) nesting behavior more complicated than expected: "Seeing comparable organisation in Antarctic waters undermines the idea that cold, dark seas only support simple or scattered life." share.google/LQkjT0WvLWDc...

If you haven't preordered THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME yet, Book Riot says you're going to be missing out . . . Let me also say how thrilling it is to get a book about SPACE-TIME!!!!! on lists of books by people of color 😭 bookriot.com/the-most-ant...

poets.org/2020-on-lear... I keep coming back to the beauty of this poem, the beautiful mind in which these words gestated, emerged, and the terrible knowledge that Good is gone forever, the eyes that could see this world and her own soul extinct. Fuck ICE. Fuck Trump and his gestapo. Fuck them all.

🔥 @markruffalo.bsky.social : “I gotta be honest, I’m not feeling so great. Renee Good was murdered... stormtroopers running around terrorizing. As much as I love all this, I can’t pretend all this crazy stuff isn’t happening. We have a president who says laws don’t apply to him- this is crazy.”

Speaking about the murder of Renée Nicole Good Much love for Jasmine Crockett 🫶

Just days into 2026, the killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked protests around the US. If you’re planning to protest, here’s how to safeguard your digital security.

this one by Sara Anam hit like a brick, absolutely had to share this powerful one-two punch

Brownshirts

Looks like ICE is now cracking down on … Native Americans. This letter was just posted by the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North/South Dakota: “Our Nation is a sovereign government and our members are not immigrants. We are not subject to immigration enforcement on our own lands.”

If you need a temporary break from the grief and despair.

…it should break your heart to kill.

Make it viral.

If you can stomach watching the video, do so. It's 100% murder of an unarmed woman.

And whose brilliant collection might this be? Oh! The incomparable @sfreligh.bsky.social of course 🩵

What do these companies have in common? -Cigna -Comcast -General Mills -Allstate -Marriott -Hilton -Walmart -Amazon -Microsoft -Meta All promised after January 6, 2021 to stop funding lawmakers who tried to overturn the 2020 election. And all have broken that promise.

Don’t let them erase it or rewrite it. The seditionists are those in this video as well as the whole of the Republican Party and the members of SCOTUS who are supporting and sustaining our Traitor-in-Chief through silence, acquiescence, or outright gleeful abandonment of our constitution.

The “I’m with Stupid Administration” !

“The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.” -- June Jordan

This interview between @alinaetc.bsky.social and poet Lisa Olstein is so smart. The images of Olsen’s poems that accompany the interview are really exciting. Next on my “ read” list.

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been…” Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to his wife, the sculptor Clara Rilke, on January 1, 1907 (Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton) #everynightapoem #january

Pulled my Lucille Clifton tarot card this morning. I have my manuscript out to six contests (running into the road?). Now I’m worried that this means I’m going to get creamed 🤣

We cannot become numb to the outrage of this. The wife of the President’s Senior Advisor threatens a sovereign nation.

Oh what a perfect poem. From @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social's book Good Bones. #poem #booksky #writing

On X, a senior U.S. Justice Department official is promoting a post that praises colonization as “one of the greatest things that ever happened to the backwards parts of the world.”👇

I want to wake up to headlines saying the US President has been forcibly removed from power for his corruption, election-rigging, war crimes, and murder of innocent people.

“Isn’t limbo a kind of limo?”

Very pleased that New York City will have an inaugural poet and such a fine one in the great Cornelius Eady. Poet Elizabeth Alexander of the Mamdani arts and culture transition committee doing good work: “Poets and artists…can say things that politicians can’t say.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/n...

Artists show the way it's done.