A social worker holds a group for teenagers at a school. They only half pay attention to him. Then something happens, and they pay attention to each other.Benjamin Gucciardi was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His first book, West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021), chosen by Elena Passarello as the winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in Oakland, California through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Gucciardi’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Have you ever had a private moment — perhaps in the middle of the night — in a large city? When it just seems like it’s you and the great dreaming metropolis? Rowan Ricardo Phillips brings us into a memory he can’t forget, complete with a Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack.Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Heaven (2015), Living Weapon (2020), and the forthcoming Silver (2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new, forthcoming edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (Picador, 2019). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Whiting Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the president of the board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic. Phillips received his doctoral degree in English literature from Brown University.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

In a poem of strict rhymes and old forms, Alexander Posey (1873-1908), a poet of the Creek Nation, poses challenges to pomposity.Alexander Posey was a poet, editor, and satirist born in 1873 in the Creek Nation. Posey was the publisher of the first Indian-published daily newspaper, the Eufaula Indian Journal.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Alexander Posey’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

In a church there are liturgies and prayers and statues. But in José Olivarez’s poem, there are more urgent things taking place, things that have “no time to wait.”José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants.  He is the author of Promises of Gold, a collection of poems. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhereFind the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer José Olivarez’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Friendships deserve praise songs, and here’s a praise song — an ode — to friends that have crossed continents for each other, and would go further if needed.Sudanese by way of D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, and Home Is Not a Country, and is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, the Arab American Book Award, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she is also the recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, The Atlantic, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, among others.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Safia Elhillo’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.