The writer on America’s fear culture, bookstores as community builders, and why writers should care about their character more than their characters.

Erica Wright talks to translator André Naffis-Sahely about translating one of Morocco's greatest living poets and the 'commodity' of despair.

“I wanted history I could touch like a flank of a beast.”

to startle / one dead to what living’s no longer worth.

she, standing there now with all the immodest strength / of a clapboard house, who has not even asked for this light.

Moonlight poured fiery poison into my life.

I’d sleep against the wall in the unemployment line / next to men who slit throats in another country

you gripped the axe’s handle, forever poised / to make a mark

If, in the church, there was blood / her blood was colorless

You can no more waterboard yourself / than sneak up on yourself at a party

where does dark begin settling / my little bones.

I carried our wedding china out to the dock, threw every goblet into the ocean.

my mother / unraveled both her eyes to the ravens

Our guest poetry editor selects poems that sit on "the knife edge between what we call the everyday and what we call the night."

Half of this / is an illusion. See here you / there is no place that does not from.

before she announced her arrival, she devoured it.

I could feel something bright / As it left the body.

It’s your turn, it’s always your turn, / the night says.

Dear friends / the ash-fall is thickening here

When we returned by a pinprick in darkness / we found ourselves in childhood

you’re nothing, / absolutely nothing, / but a Palestinian.

Here, we always sell / the negatives for free.

Erica Wright talks with a poet who didn’t set out to write about war.

What unnameable would throw this on the floor, / noon refracted through blue windows

We ferried into America on the pitch of the same folksong.

Daughter, your mother’s prayer teeth would sharpen / and shred your opaque sack of sleep.

We are resting from our courage.

Fever wasn’t the only thing to break / in Cambodia

the prairies are overrun with pioneer wives out of time / carrying rifles

The Guggenheim fellow on returning to free verse in her latest collection, the difficulty of being joyful, and why poetry has taken the place of religion in her life.

Why poetry needs more grit.

Good evening Secretary of the Interior Brain, glowing / wick of my infomercial light

the vertebrae went down and already / I saw no more than eternity and coldness

the way your blood here to there / drifts off course

There is no word for emergency after the body / wilts.

I never did heal, we each / took our turns at crying in cubicles

what’s life but where my memories keep shacking up

The popular literature says I got / the right amount of sleep

Just tell me it’s impossible for someone / to stop being invincible later on after starting out that way.

This is when I’d like to see gravity happen.

The rope almost loops / in an obvious feast of beheading.

I looked in the mirror and saw myself stealing things with a devil.

my question to you is how will we hold off distress

It means you can still feel the heavy thrum of thigh / on saddle, can smell the man’s blood-hunger

but the girl stayed dancing / underwater a wild catfish tangled in broken whiskers / until you couldn’t tell them apart

First he suspected she swallowed / the pins herself from compulsion, but then no, that was not it.

What’d’ya mean you don’t know me? / I’ve bought bibles off you before!

I stepped so cleanly out / the leeches clinked and fell

Who's coughing? It's my throat, that's all. / Really, no.—I never saw you.

The trouble with night // is morning, she’s singing, wringing out socks / over a tub

He saw kind rich men walking through the dark as if through a city.

A conversation between poets about writing place, time, technology, and transformation.

How we blink and chew and find ourselves // cubicle-hunched, tightened under humming fluorescents

I lose my mind, you’re without foreskin.

Poet Jaswinder Bolina discusses writing about race, the process of being translated, and more.

When they finish, let them lob / the spent meat and mumped skin / like siege shot.

This is the vocabulary of killing.

Once the bone has been ground up, who, through muslin, would recognize her hand from a dog’s paw?

Live an orchard life then pulp it for another.

We see the night / for what it really is, a house / for our bodies

Starve us, // stave off hyenas with our youth— / our muscle as protein, lion’s bait.

Under this desk I have hidden / for two months. I have tried / at shadowy. Have failed / at being wonderful.

...you can sleep without stretching your legs; / you can live never lifting your head.

Everyone’s face reminds me of a buried city, cars up on blocks leaning through // the slanted light (like jail cells)...

And I know: a hitch-hiker who never enters!

...their sleeping, their dormancy, / how it stirred in me a hunger / black as a pocked tooth.

She is knee-sick and fawning on her felt-tipped prize / for exceeding her bones in the sprinting test.

Oftentimes the bourbon distilleries in this land I’ve pitched / my tent in under-distribute for what I have in mind.

When my arms first grew firm I began to trust / myself to love someone outside my family.

I carried a machine on my back / from a tundra to a new northwest.

we talk about getting another widow / for her to putter with

A huge is an instinct, / a severe is a creature / of proportion.

in the outskirts of Lisbon, the Afrikander, / builds a bone temple for all the lads

Let us legally do what we must do in the dark

Wet pets lounge out in the trees, all the abandoned bits / children leave, beyond what the self wants (to be bigger, / less attached).

I have written this poem on the theme “To the post-3.11 world, as I see it,” but this is just the prelude.

I would make, / it occurs to me one / sun-smeared evening after too much vodka, not / a bad Aztec.

Tonight’s theme is: you are a baby nihilist.

I’ve seen him before, crawling / under church pews, tying // parishioners’ shoes together.

I’ll death so well they’ll say dying is ripping me off

A tale crashing in the glass garden

Everything that can be done to a man / was done to him.

We were always restless in the boondocks.

I wish there were simpler words for this—to reach a point zero or the limit, to write: "It was so hard without you."

Beth Harrison, interim director of the Academy of American Poets, talks about the value of a national poetry month, the well-versed movie, and Poem in Your Pocket Day.