Dive In | Poetry In Voice

The Problem With Being a Box Too Small for Its Contents

Misch expounds the unbearable work needed after a breakup: to separate from your lost love and “rejoin yourselves…even when you don’t want to.”

The New Experience

Join the speaker on a whirlwind journey towards a surprising realization.

Fast Commute

Laurie Graham weathers an incongruous ice storm in this poem-excerpt that asks us to pause and understand that we are present here, “and with this understanding to start to hear.”

Modestine

A woman writes a tender poem about her dad’s struggle with dementia.

Other

In Other, Livesay breaks free of patriarchy’s hold and ventures into landscapes of mountain, cedar forests, night skies, and the fierce interior of her spirit.

What Is Poetry

Using only the letters in the title’s question, Holbrook generates a smorgasbord of weird and delightful answers.

The Powwow at the End of the World

Sherman Alexie slams the environmental destruction of settler-colonialism as we travel on an upstream course towards the powwow at the end of the world.

At the Centre

In this poem of a woman in deep repose, her seeds of self-care begin to blossom.

Beat! Beat! Drums!

With rich bombastic language and Whitman's trademark sprawling lines, this poem rallies troops for war.

Application Form

Identity is elusive. Maybe it doesn’t exist at all.

Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

In this tender poem of healing, care and remembrance, Ocean Vuong reaches out to his younger self.

The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)

The abled-bodied gaze is an intrusive force in this poem, making a spectacle of a disabled body and attempting to reduce them to their impairment.

The Fatigue

Fatigue is often the first sign something is wrong with one's body. Fatigue looms larger than life in this poem which grapples with meds, family, and coping.

Picking Up a Dandelion

A short and poignant poem, stretching out a brief moment of beauty.

Pale Blue Cover

In this nostalgic poem, the speaker reminisces about the author Matt Cohen.

Marshlands

Quietly pause to take in the colours and sounds of a marsh.

aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?

The stunningly cruel comments of an internet forum reverberate throughout a sleepless night

Late Prayer

Erin Robinsong delivers a quiet and fierce prayer for life on Earth in an age of ecological destruction and oligarchical domination

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

What would you ask a knight if you found him alone and palely loitering along a barren path?

Echolalia

Exploring the tension between desire and satisfaction, this is “a poem that you have to kiss your way through without being kissed,” says Williams.

The Swimmer’s Moment

Will you choose to observe from the rim of the whirlpool, or its centre?

April 30, 2014

One spring day, dreading an afternoon appointment that will dredge up all kinds of terrible memories, the speaker of the poem focuses on the natural world around her.

Before the Birth of One of Her Children

This frank, devout poem confronts the risks facing a 17th-century woman in childbirth.

Plenty

Who would have thought a trip to the grocery store could be so full of beauty?

Reluctance

Even after you’ve jumped all the fences, climbed all the hills, and looked at the world, it can be hard to accept how you feel…

Blank Sonnet

Set in Halifax of the 1930s, this sensual, inebriated love poem plays with the sonnet form.

Dear Updike

Evelyn Lau powerfully describes the world around her in order to grieve the loss of a beloved writer.

Opus 75, Sestina in B-flat for the Glockenspiel

A silent glockenspiel plays out a teenage girl’s anxieties about growing up and fitting in.

Where There’s a Wall

Both beauty and violence are just on the other side of the wall.

The Visions of Stone Carrier

In this dreamlike piece exploring memory and primogeniture, N. Scott Momaday casts a haunting spell that transports the reader through mystery and reminiscence.

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

A clash of cultures in a department store bathroom showcases pride and power in the towns matrons as well as the space in the middle where the speaker lives

The Blue Guitar

In this glosa poem, P.K. Page strums out questions about being an artist and telling the truth.

Common Magic

Do you ever wonder how anything gets done when we’re all swirling in our own galaxies of thought and experience? This poem does too.

The Days of the Unicorns

Phyllis Webb beautifully writes an ode to the majestic unicorn.

Regardless

This vibrant list poem celebrates the right to just Be.

The Dead

This sonnet considers the fragmented, elusive way the dead resurface in our lives.

The Lonely Land

In this free verse poem, snapshots of a wild landscape show that beauty and conflict are not mutually exclusive — and that one may be derived from the other.

Famous

In Famous, Naomi Nye speaks to the relationship between objects and the ideas they represent. She is as famous to the poem as the poem is famous its words.

Journey of the Magi

One of the three wise men who travelled to Bethlehem upon the birth of Jesus Christ describes his version of the story and the emotional upheaval he experiences from witnessing a miracle that shatters his previous beliefs and way of life.

grass

In his short, funny poem, Ward Maxwell asks us to step on the grass, saying “it deserves it.” But isn’t that the point of grass?