In “ROLL CALL: NEW TAROT NAMES FOR BLACK GIRLS,” Amber McBride treats us to a playful litany of language that twists and leaps and never stumbles. Flavored with old-time Christianity, old-time hoodoo, and a modern alchemy all her own, it talks back to prejudice, reclaims the words meant to take people down, and forges new identities that shimmer with strength and strangeness. Amber McBride is an English professor at the University of Virginia. She is the author of several books, including the forthcoming poetry collection, Thick with Trouble (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House, 2024). Her debut young adult novel, Me (Moth) (Square Fish/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, 2023) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it also won the 2022 Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe Award for New Talent. McBride low-key practices hoodoo and high-key devours books (100 or so a year keep her well fed). She is a bit of a book dragon; she collects more than she reads. In her spare time, she enjoys pretending it is Halloween every day, organizing her crystals, watching K-dramas, and accidentally scrolling through TikTok for 3 hours at a time. She believes in ghosts, and she believes in you.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Amber McBride’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

A fragile and wondrous technology that we all possess, the human breath powers any number of things in our lives — speeches, feats of music, athleticism, and more. Carl Dennis’s powerful and meditative poem “Breath” calls on us to take a moment, give our breath our full attention, and celebrate it. Carl Dennis is the author of 13 works of poetry, including Earthborn (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House, 2022), as well as a collection of essays called Poetry as Persuasion (University of Georgia Press, 2001). In 2000, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his contribution to American poetry. His 2001 collection Practical Gods (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House) won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Buffalo, New York.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Carl Dennis’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Our lives are filled with distances, the physical spans that we travel but also the stranger, vaster expanses between our past and our present or between feeling anchored and connected and feeling terribly alone. A poem can capture all of those in a way that a map can’t, as Elisa Gonzalez superbly demonstrates in “To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self.”Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University MFA program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut poetry collection is Grand Tour (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023).Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Elisa Gonzalez’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Most of us do our eavesdropping shyly and secretively, but Ofelia Zepeda’s poem “Deer Dance Exhibition” welcomes us to listen in on an exchange between people as they watch a ceremonial dance. Along the way, we get the sense that what we’re witnessing is more than a conversation — it’s the sounds and sensations of life itself. Ofelia Zepeda is a poet, Regents Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education. She is the current editor of Sun Tracks, launched in 1971 and one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. Her current poetry books include: Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (The University of Arizona Press, 1995), Jewed ‘I-hoi/ Earth Movements (Kore Press, 2005), and Where Clouds are Formed (The University of Arizona Press, 2008). Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Ofelia Zepeda’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Even in the most uneventful of human lives, uncertainty and doubts will inevitably intrude. When faced with those, what can you do to steady yourself? One suggestion: Turn to the poem “When in Doubt” by Sandra Cisneros, where she generously shares some of the wisdom that she’s gleaned over the years. Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. Cisneros’s most recent collection is Woman Without Shame (Knopf Publishing Group 2022). Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, national and international book awards, including the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. More recently, she received the Ford Foundation's Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2022, she was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. We’re pleased to offer Sandra Cisneros’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

To be alive is to be in conversation with the dead. The ghosts of loved ones are always swirling around us, and sometimes we’re lucky enough to catch a glimpse. In the poem “Three Mangoes, £1,” Kandace Siobhan Walker describes a surprising encounter with her late grandmother at a busy market, and an encounter with a stranger.Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee, and Welsh heritage. Her poems have appeared in Magma, The White Review, Poetry Wales, and a number of anthologies. She is the author of the pamphlet Kaleido (Bad Betty, 2022). In 2021, she was both the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and the winner of the White Review Poet’s Prize. In 2019, she won the Guardian 4th Estate BAME short story prize. Cowboy, her debut full-length collection from CHEERIO Publishing, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2023.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Kandace Siobhan Walker’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

It is an intimate thing, to watch a lover while they sleep. In Francisco Aragón’s translation of Francisco X. Alarcón’s homoerotic poem, “Asleep You Become a Continent,” a man views his sleeping lover’s body like it’s a landscape: legs underneath sheets become mountains and valleys. The waking lover describes this view like an explorer might an unknown country; wondering what he will find.Francisco X. Alarcón was an award-winning Chicano poet and educator. He authored fourteen volumes of poetry, published seven books for children, and taught at the University of California, Davis, where he directed the Spanish for Native Speakers Program.Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. His books include After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020), Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010), and Puerta de Sol (Bilingual Review Press, 2005).  He’s also the editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). A native of San Francisco, CA, he is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where he directs their literary initiative, Letras Latinas. His work has appeared in over twenty anthologies and various literary journals. He has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, art galleries, the Dodge Poetry Festival, and the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. He divides his time between South Bend, IN, and Mililani, HI.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Francisco Aragón’s translation, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Conor Kerr’s “Winter Songs” depicts a future scene: coyotes roaming through a rewilded city, digging up the bones of Indigenous ancestors who then regenerate and reclaim what was taken. Power is dismantled, something original is restored.Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer living in Edmonton. A member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, he is descended from the Lac Ste. Anne Métis and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His Ukrainian family are settlers in Treaty 4 and 6 territories in Saskatchewan. He is the author of the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers and Old Gods, as well as the novel Avenue of Champions, which was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize, and won the 2022 ReLIT award. Conor is an assistant professor at the University of Alberta where he teaches creative writing.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Conor Kerr’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Valencia Robin’s poem portrays a tense relationship between mother and daughter; perhaps each resembling the other too much. In desperation — and shock — the daughter says the worst thing she can think of to her mother. What follows is like the fall of a dictator, a coup, an end, an opening.Valencia Robin is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes poetry, painting, collage, and sculpture. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, her debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, won Persea Books’ First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was named one of Library Journal’s best poetry books of 2019. A co-founder of GalleryDAAS at the University of Michigan, Robin has an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. Robin currently teaches at East Tennessee State University and lives in Johnson City, Tennessee.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Valencia Robin’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In a poem about how a small moment can help you make a wise decision, Eugenia Leigh finds the strength to go back home after storming out. No self-pity in the poem, just humor and brilliance. She had every reason to leave, and finds every reason to return. Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of two collections of poetry, Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (2014), winner of the Late Night Library's 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry, as well as a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. She currently serves as a poetry editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary, a BIPOC-focused literary journal and literary arts organization.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Eugenia Leigh’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes. 

Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama is back on Monday, January 1. Featured poets in this season include Amber McBride, Eugenia Leigh, Francisco Aragón, Ray Young Bear, and many more. New episodes released every Monday and Friday through February 23.Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever you listen.