Why do empty places sometimes lend themselves to reflection or contemplation? In this poem, a poet — describing herself as a nonbeliever — goes into a chapel to sit. In the corner there are some girls talking, there are stained glass windows, and the poet is at once at home in herself and far from the woman she loves. The high emptiness of the church seems to give a resting place for the emptiness she’s feeling. While there’s no resolution, the larger empty space offers a holding place for the poet.
Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary, the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic online, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
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Rita Wong — flush
Maria Dahvana Headley — Beowulf
Michael Klein — Swale
Ray Young Bear — Our Bird Aegis
Suji Kwock Kim — Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border
Amber McBride — ROLL CALL: NEW TAROT NAMES FOR BLACK GIRLS
Carl Dennis — Breath
Elisa Gonzalez — To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self
Ofelia Zepeda — Deer Dance Exhibition
Sandra Cisneros — When in Doubt
Kandace Siobhan Walker — Three Mangoes, £1
Francisco Aragón — Asleep You Become a Continent
Conor Kerr — Winter Songs
Valencia Robin — The Coup
Eugenia Leigh — How the Dung Beetle Finds Its Way Home
Poetry Unbound — Season 8 Trailer
Clint Smith with Krista Tippett — What We Know in the "Marrow of Our Bones"
BONUS: Truth-seeking and the Symphony of Language with Henri Cole
BONUS: Making Space for the Erotic with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
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