Adam Zagajewski – Codeword

“your life too is becoming the oil in a lamp on whose surface the weak blue flame of homeland wanders”

Eavan Boland – Instructions

“To write about age you need to take something and break it”

Luisa A. Igloria – Custody

“In summer, because dark descends more slowly, it’s hard to scan the sky for the hunter”

Carl Phillips – Of That City, the Heart

“gone, leaving us with our human need always to impose on memory a body language, some shape that holds”

Jaan Kaplinski – Our Shadows

“that heaven is so vast and void
once we will return, once we will all return”

Ross Gay – Burial

“before breast-stroking into the xylem, riding the elevator up
through the cambium and into the leaves where, when you put your ear close enough, you can hear him whisper”

Terrance Hayes – What it Look Like

“Don’t you lie about who you are sometimes and then realize the lie is true?”

Linda Hogan – Map

“There are names each thing has for itself, and beneath us the other order already moves”

Ruth Muskrat Bronson – If You Knew

“If you could know the empty ache of loneliness, masked well behind the calm indifferent face”

Emma Lazarus – The New Colossus

“A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles”

Robert Duncan – Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

“within words that is a field folded”