Have you ever gotten consumed by watching a couple argue in public and trying to decipher what’s really going on between them? Denise Duhamel’s deliciously entertaining “How It Will End” offers us that experience. Come for the voyeurism, stay for the awareness it stirs up. Why are we so captivated by other people’s disagreements? And how can what we notice about them teach us about ourselves?

Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Pink Lady, Scald, and Blowout. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Denise Duhamel’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

Even though Palestinian-American Fady Joudah’s poem is sparingly titled “[...],” an ellipsis surrounded by brackets, this work itself is psychologically dense. Through crisp lines and language, it wrestles with the nature of human ambivalence — about things like fear, desire, disaster, liberty — and it finds certainty only in the shaky universal ground of that ambivalence.

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published five other collections of poems, including Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and children, where he works as a physician in internal medicine.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Fady Joudah’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

Benjamin Zephaniah’s urgent, imperative “To Michael Menson” was written when he was a poet in residence at a human rights barrister in England. His poem resonates with his repeated calls for justice for a murdered Black musician — not a justice that is gullible, impotent, or hopeless but one that is clear-eyed, collaborative, and mighty.

Benjamin Zephaniah was born and raised in Birmingham, England. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including City Psalms, Propa Propaganda, and Too Black, Too Strong. In 2000, he was poet in residence for the chambers of human rights barrister Michael Mansfield, where he worked on numerous cases, including the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Zephaniah appeared on the TV show Peaky Blinders and is also known for his poetry books for children.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.