Alberto Ríos — December Morning in the Deser...

Host Pádraig Ó Tuama shares “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare, a favorite childhood poem of his, and offers an audio postscript to Season 10 of Poetry Unbound. Later in 2026, he will bring us more Poetry Unbound to look forward to — find out what and when here. In the meantime ...  Show more

Have you ever watched, in awe, as a skilled gymnast or skater lifts off and completes a dizzying number of revolutions in less than a second before landing safely back down? That’s how you may feel upon reading the great Leonard Cohen’s urgent, dreamlike poem “I, 8” from Book of ...  Show more

Loss and belonging are explored in an installation at the Barbican Centre in London from Sierra Leonian poet and artist/filmmaker Julianknxx which hears choirs and musicians from cities across the world voice a single refrain: ‘We are what’s left of us’. Momtaza Mehri has been Yo ...  Show more

An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End of Poetry” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “To Be Made Whole.”Ada Limón i ...  Show more

The Cuban American civil engineer turned writer, Richard Blanco, straddles the many ways a sense of place merges with human emotion to make home and belonging — personal and communal. The most recent — and very resonant — question he’s asked by way of poetry is: how to love a cou ...  Show more

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of po ...  Show more