This poem feels relevant today

“Sometimes you don’t survive whole. You only survive in part. But the *grandeur* of life is that attempt. It’s not about the solution. It’s about being as fearless as one can and behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances.”

That Key & Peele sketch with the fake sugar packet and the explosion in the distance and the little pause and then the real sugar ☕️ ☀️ #mood

poetry editors this morning: glad we shared the new cover yesterday 😭

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ~ W.H. Auden

This book. Y’all will be blown away.

It’s Dr. Slop’s monster, actually

“Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life.” — Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, pg. 15

I am living for artists pulling out of their Kennedy Center shows. Pull Out Culture. Here for it.

“I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you.” —from “This is How You Lose the Time War”

Whoever said the perfect lover turns into a pizza at midnight was correct. Or during long editing sprints?! yees

Will you eat tomorrow? What lies north of the pillowcase? Can you stomach the uncertainty of rain, microwaved porridge, the open door? Do you have something left to say? What are you watching, if not the birds? Are you already gone? Elane Kim, “Axiom”

The sounds that came out of my mouth when I realized some of the em-dashes were en-dashes in a manuscript.

"We used a freakishly advanced language model built on trillions of pages of text and crazy linear algebra engines powered by cubic meters of natural gas to achieve a task that could have been done with some dice and a look up table" is like 80% of popular AI applications

Good morning and happy new year and NEW COVER REVEAL! 🎉🎉🎉 Elane Kim’s debut book of poems Antibody is out in February 2026, and we could not be more elated. Preorder here, and use the code 2025GIFT for 10% off your order and free shipping: riverriverbooks.org/store/-Preor...

By suppertime all that remains is the scent of balsam fir. If it’s darkness we're having, let it be extravagant. Jane Kenyon

Wow. Just wow.

At a soccer bar and in love with the gays reading books and not into the game at all

Guyyys I just accidentally called someone embarrassing and boring at the same time EMBORESSING is my neologism for 2026.

ooh yes this is what we call voice #booksky

Let's have more poems this year, hm?

Three new micros from Beth Gilstrap’s forthcoming There Is News Along the Ohio River (February, 2026!), in Cleaver Magazine! 📚💙🎉 @bettysueblue.bsky.social

Lover, I am bomb-hued, napped, savvy about the way this world sedates and separates. Patricia Smith, “Post-Racial”

“….who pulls poems from the center of the earth.” Elizabeth Alexander on Patricia Smith and for real, for real 🔥 🔥 🔥

Today's Featured Poem: "Second Time Trying to Say Where My Son Was" by Patricia Smith from The Intentions of Thunder published by @scribnerbooks.bsky.social Read here: poems.com/poem/second-...

What the KENNEDY Center used to be… Remember that time Aretha Franklin performed at the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors, paying tribute to Carole King, who co-wrote “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman,” and it brought a tear to Obama’s eye and everyone to their feet? And Carole King’s reaction. Wow.

let love be / at the end Lucille Clifton

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. from "Burning the Old Year" by Naomi Shihab Nye buff.ly/B6l7Ho0

“…This moment, this seed, this wave of the / sea, this look, this instant of love./ Years over wars and an imagining of peace…” Muriel Rukeyser poets.org/poem/elegy-joy

I wrote, I loved, I broke apart. I write. I love. I break apart. Patricia Smith

My year in review, in books. 78 books. Well, the published ones, anyway. Add several hundred for the unpublished. ❤️📚 Via @thestorygraph.com

Addis is dark at night, as if the low grade electricity cannot burn through the heavy gloom. On New Year’s Eve, the shops are emptying, the pavements are covered with the aromatic . . . from "New Year's Eve in Addis" by Kwame Dawes buff.ly/T02fCuC

Always worth a post

Treat time. @poetpatriciasmith.bsky.social @scribnerbooks.bsky.social

Did you know that going Oprah on your dogs and saying “Who wants a cracker?! EVERYBODY GETS A CRACKER!” will cheer you and everyone up 1000%

Call it a close shave if you want, but here's my 2025 Recommended Reading list. Grateful for all the poets & for @hanvanderhart.bsky.social for encouraging folks a year ago to do small press-only lists! Last time was so fun, I had to do it again 😎 necessarymess.wordpress.com/2025/12/31/r...

Do not come for me on the last day of this godforsaken year touting the advantages of AI.

I watched this video on best practices for AI usage for student writers, and the problem is I think it’s better to sit with the poverty of your own mind than to brainstorm dozens of ideas with ChatGPT. So you can only think of one concept/theme re: Romeo and Juliet? Good. Write on that one.

I have a pain in my heart and I’m pretty sure a new book of Patricia Smith would fix it.

I always read Iris Murdoch to close out the year and welcome the year. Let’s bring the idea of perfection back.

“seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno…” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities translated by William Weaver

poets supporting visual artists and visual artists supporting supporting poets to infinity as far as I’m concerned

all at once a queer accident happened

Under this framework, Jim Crow was ok, slavery was ok, the forced removal of indigenous people was ok, etc. There are certain things even when passed through liberal democratic means are illiberal and should never be allowed.

"He was the greatest patriot, in their eyes, who brawled the loudest, and who cared the least for decency. He was their champion who, in the brutal fury of his own pursuit, could cast no stigma upon them for the hot knavery of theirs." ---Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit #novels #literature

I am feeling like such a badger—I just want to go down deep, under the roots of tree, and stay in the warm dark, out of the wind, until spring.

A reminder from Charles Olson, who was born on this day in 1910

Lydia Davis. New Year’s Resolution. ✨

Absolutely in love with this new poem by @riverriverbooks.bsky.social author @rachelsedelman.bsky.social! ❤️📚🎉🎉