“Today’s poem touched me because it made me think of my grandmother,” shares host @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social in today’s episode. “It made me think of her care, but also about the life she had after her marriage ended.” Read “Country Night” by Laura Newbern: bit.ly/3K8meQl

“Today’s poem acknowledges the beauty we have—the view we have. It also mourns the beauty that would exist without our interference. Holding space for both is a feat of empathy and imagination,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social. Read “Lake” by @noahfalck.bsky.social‬: bit.ly/3ULVbMC

“When I think about ways to foster empathy, perspective, and care, one of those ways is poetry. I know poetry can’t stop bombs from falling, and it can’t feed the starving, and it can’t evacuate people to safety. I know this,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social in today’s episode.

“The “Choose Your Own Adventure” aspect of life is something on my mind a lot. I suspect it was on this poet’s mind, too,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social. Read “Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield” by Mikko Harvey: bit.ly/4mz1way 📸: Grace Sachi Troxell 📖: @houseofanansi.bsky.social

“Today’s poem looks at the anxiety and the absurdity of America: How many people seem fixated on the dangers outside our borders without acknowledging the dangers within,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social. Read “Are you bringing fruits, plants, seeds,” by Karen Llagas: bit.ly/3VdzuVR

“Today’s poem captures that feeling when you’ve just HAD it—you’ve absolutely hit your limit. But at the same time, you realize that you’re the only person who can pick yourself back up,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social in today’s episode. Read “New York Address” by Linda Gregg: bit.ly/4mUVdxF

“Today’s poem is a celebration of creatures we tend to overlook or even disdain. It invites us to reconsider our perspective,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social in today’s episode. Read “I Find Myself Defending Pigeons” by Keith S. Wilson: bit.ly/45JUsRi 📖: @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“I think you’ll want to listen to this poem more than once, letting it lap at you like water, letting it rise around you like smoke from a beach bonfire, letting it sing to you like an aria,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social in today’s ep. Read “Bonfire Opera” by Danusha Laméris: bit.ly/45owPyC

“Today’s poem is a celebration of sound, and also a celebration of our own power to interpret sound and make meaning—as poets do. Poems, like songs, are meant to live in the air. They are their own music,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social. Read “Étude” by Amy Gerstler: bit.ly/4mo3MkD

“Today’s poem reads to me like a love poem, a tribute, to a long friendship. It reminds me that part of how we know ourselves is through the people who know us best, and who have loved us through our changes,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social ‬ in today’s episode.

@maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social reads a wonderful poem, "Tea" by Leila Chatti, for her @slowdownshow.org debut. www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2025...

“Maybe the ultimate self care is learning to give yourself the respect, the tenderness, and the grace you extend to others. To love yourself the way you love others,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social in today’s episode. Read “Tea” by Leila Chatti: bit.ly/3HDJjJy 📸: Aric Velbel

And we’re back! A brand new season of The Slowdown starts today, with our new host: @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social! Listen to The Slowdown wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to subscribe to our free daily newsletter at slowdownshow.org! 📸: Devon Albeit

“Today’s poem is from a dear teacher, Sharon Olds. This poem has stuck with me for years. It examines the honest way in which some people are able to be intimate without all the heavy weight of romance,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore ep. Read “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds: bit.ly/41tflhZ

“Today’s poem explores how the love of an animal can help us process grief and even remember the precious value of touch,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore episode. Read “Lately I Am Trying” by Sanna Wani @sannawani.bsky.social‬: bit.ly/4lkbtam

Thank you to the folks at @slowdownshow.org for sharing this poem. (One of many reasons why I'm grateful for public media.) This poem is one of the oldest I've kept throughout the many rewrites of my debut collection, "Maybe the Body" which comes out with @tinhouse.bsky.social in February!

“Today’s poem centers on ideas of hunger and fullness. It asks what can satisfy us in a world that is often telling us we are not enough and will never have enough,” shares Ada Limón in today’s ep. Read “I Worry My Mother Will Die and I Will Know Nothing ” by @asaldrake.bsky.social: bit.ly/41k2lLV

“Today’s poem is a perfect example of starting a poem in one place and ending it in another, unexpected place. I admire how this poem reveals a truth and a desire that pulsates under each stanza,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore episode. Read “Trash” by Joshua Bennett: bit.ly/3UYbvK5

“Today’s poem, by the beloved poet E.E. Cummings, does that work of showing us the resounding ‘yes’ to the poem—and also ‘yes’ to the real, tangible, touchable, life,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore episode. Read “[since feeling is first]” by E.E. Cummings: bit.ly/3Ja3mQ9

“Today’s poem describes the joy of falling asleep next to someone you love. Because whether you’re snuggled in with pets, people, or some combo of the two, it’s bliss when love makes you into a pack,” shares Tracy K. Smith. Read “Sleeping with the Chihuahua” by Tami Haaland: bit.ly/4osf6xM

“What is it about food that feeds us? Not just the calories and nutrients, but the deeper yearning certain foods quench?” asks Tracy K. Smith in today’s encore episode. Read “Fish Heads” by R.A. Villanueva: bit.ly/45nnFBg

“Reading W.S. Merwin's poem ‘Thanks’ takes courage, because it insists upon a fierce form of moral reckoning,” shares Tracy K. Smith in today’s encore episode. Read “Thanks” by W.S. Merwin: bit.ly/45lYsXE @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

Some news! 🎉🎉🎉

Today, we’re thrilled to share that the new host of The Slowdown is @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social! The Slowdown will return with new episodes on August 18th. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for our free email newsletter at slowdownshow.org 📸: @cowtownchad.bsky.social

Read today’s encore poem “Workshop” by Jacob Shores-Argüello: bit.ly/41kr1n9

“Today’s poem carries that same energy of self-discovery, inevitable change, and an extravagance of living,” shares Major in today’s encore episode. Read “Nocturne” by Oliver Baez Bendorf @oliverbaezbendorf.bsky.social‬: bit.ly/3IUaqAj

“Today’s sobering poem lands a powerful reminder: that even when we adhere to a belief against war, even when we wish not to collude in acts of aggression, in a powerful nation as ours, mere citizenship implicates us,” shares Major. Read “Accessory to War” by Kim Stafford: bit.ly/4kYWHpb

Congrats to SWWIMmer @chloemartinez.bsky.social on today’s encore feature on @slowdownshow.org! "In Love" was first published in SWWIM Every Day: www.swwim.org/swwimeveryda...

“I feel a heavy kinship with the speaker in today’s poem. Their embrace of the world exhibits the ecstatic yearning and vulnerability essential to the imagination,” shares Major in today’s encore episode. Read “In Love” by Chloe Martinez: bit.ly/3U5Hx6H

“Today’s poem disentangles the quest for money, transactional desire, and lyric subjectivity. Its teasing interplay of language brings into close proximity art, social class, and manners of currency,” shares Major in today’s encore episode. Read “00000000” by Erin Marie Lynch: bit.ly/4lRVaTm

"Everything is a union of one kind or another. Foothills know this. Highways too." Thanks to @slowdownshow.org for sharing @nataliehomer.bsky.social's poem "Sunflowers in the Median" once again. Hear Ada Limón read the piece here: www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2025...

“Today’s poem dignifies the lives of people in low-income neighborhoods whose early practices of thrift and ingenuity created intrinsic values of sustainability, personal style, and care for human habitats,” shares Major in today’s encore ep. Read “eco-hood” by Melania Luisa Marte: bit.ly/3U1uu6b

“Written in letter form, today's poem captures and seeks to describe that feeling of the sublime for someone who is far away,” shares Tracy K. Smith in today’s encore episode. Read “Another Night at Sea Level” by Meg Day: bit.ly/4kxvk5l

Today’s poem is “Climbing China’s Great Wall” by Afaa M. Weaver: bit.ly/3GNe9iy

“How wonderful would it be if trust, or even love, might be possible between any of us — or even all of us. I mean, if we let ourselves believe such a thing is possible,” shares Tracy K. Smith in today’s encore episode. Read “Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry” by Jericho Brown: bit.ly/3U8JoYh

“Maybe being alive in matter is a matter of learning to hear and see and feel and trust and to love all that is available to us,” shares Tracy K. Smith in today’s encore episode. Read “Song In Which We Yet Sidestep Disaster” by @tessathon.bsky.social: bit.ly/4kBjF5J @redhenpress.bsky.social

“Today’s allegorical poem captures the staggering wisdom of finding and losing love. As we learn about another, we learn as much about ourselves — and the dialectical role of endings,” shares Major in today's encore episode. Read “Hunger” by @kelliagodon.bsky.social: bit.ly/4eyZZ0P

“Poetry makes us conscious that we are more than the fabricated narratives that degrade our humanity, more than the compensatory rhetoric of superiority,” writes Major Jackson for today’s encore episode. Read “Separation Wall” by Naomi Shihab Nye: bit.ly/4l2QzNA @boa-editions.bsky.social

“What I saw in the mother was someone beset in the wake of this imponderable wonder; she wanted us to feel what she felt – awe in looking into her baby’s eyes, to hold close to our bodies its sweet innocence”, writes Major Jackson in today’s encore ep. Read “Sono” by Suji Kwock Kim: bit.ly/44uO67o

“The produce section seemed arranged by an interior designer. Fruit sparkled in meticulous rows; baguettes bulged out of wicker baskets, and potted flowers capped every aisle…today’s poem exults in that bounty of spiritual abundance”, writes Major Jackson for today’s encore episode.

“This incorrigible habit of losing material items might be addressed through trackers, but no amount of technology can locate the spirit of our friends and family once they’ve departed this earth, another kind of loss”, writes Major Jackson for today’s encore episode.

“Today’s poem is that kind of prayer, a prayer for pleasure, for the brief moment of relief, to be made whole again. In this poem’s repetition we hear the desperation, but also the song,” shares Ada Limón. Read “Prayer Beginning with a Line by Czaykowski” by Pablo Piñero Stillmann: bit.ly/3TKgmOy

“Today’s poem does that work of exploring an inevitable truth, of what it feels like to try to prepare oneself for a whole new way of living in the world,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore episode. Read “Practicing” by Ciona Rouse @cionarouse.bsky.social‬: bit.ly/45GJL3r

I still can't believe Ada Limón read my words! Thanks @slowdownshow.org for bringing my poem back again!

“Today’s meaningful poem by Angelina Weld Grimké is a tribute to that type of dreaming, the wishes we send into the world without an idea of what will become of them,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore episode. Read “Little Grey Dreams” by Angelina Weld Grimké: bit.ly/3ZWswHD

“Today’s poem ponders what it is to be without the internet, and what it means to not have access to the constant buzz of the world,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore episode. Read “Places With Terrible Wi-Fi” by J. Estanislao Lopez @estanislaopoet.bsky.social‬: bit.ly/4kaX53x

“Today’s poem is an exploration of shouting out ourselves and our community. I love how this poem makes room for complicated praise,” shares Ada Limón in today’s encore episode. Read “Acknowledgments” by Nkosi Nkululeko @musicmannkosi.bsky.social‬: bit.ly/4eqb2cN

“I am alive in 21st Century America. I have a voice. Let it serve as a corrective to the violent and reckless power that stands against the force of love,” shares Tracy K. Smith in today’s encore episode. Read “To be of use” by Marge Piercy: bit.ly/3ZI2tUA

“Morgan Parker's poems fill me with joy for the ways they ponder and bear witness to the experience of blackness,” shares Tracy K. Smith in today’s encore episode. Read “The Book of Genesis” by Morgan Parker: bit.ly/4lhGPi3

✨ Didi Jackson reads from her poem “Wild,” recorded at our recent live event in Nashville. Watch the full event on our YouTube channel: youtu.be/NfNliG95AiE This event was produced in collaboration with The Porch and was recorded live at Analog at Hutton Hotel.