Poetry Medicine for the Soul

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features James Davis reading "Juvenilia" from his forthcoming collection (2027) Bottoming for Dummies. You can read "Juvenilia" in the Bennington Review. James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poetry has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and anthologized in two installments of Best New Poets (2011 and 2019). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Five Points, Literary Matters, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, and other notable venues. Originally from Colorado Springs, he lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches English at the University of North Texas. Learn more at www.jamesdavispoet.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Lisken Van Pelt Dus reading “if up’s the word” by E.E. Cummings. You can read "if up's the word" on the Poetry Foundation website. Lisken Van Pelt Dus is the author of two full-length collections of poems, What We’re Made Of (Cherry Grove 2016) and How Many Hands to Home (Mayapple Press 2025), as well as two chapbooks, Everywhere at Once and Letters to My Dead. She was raised in England, the US, and Mexico, and now lives with her husband in western Massachusetts, where she is an award-winning teacher of writing, languages, and martial arts. Her work can be found in many journals, anthologies, and craft books, including recently Naugatuck River Review, The Comstock Review, and The Bond Street Review, and has earned several awards and Pushcart Prize nominations. Learn more at LVPDPoetry.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Maria Lisella, former Poet Laureate of Queens, reading her poems "Cornrows" and "The Same." Born in South Jamaica, Queens, Lisella is poet and travel writer. She is a graduate of Queensborough Community College and Queens College, holds a master’s degree from the NYU–Polytechnic Institute, and attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Lisella is the author of two full-length poetry collections, At the Hour of Now (Bordighera Press, 2026) and Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books, 2014), and two chapbooks: Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada, 2009). In 2018, when her poet husband Gil Fagiani died, Lisella shepherded two of his books posthumously: Soundtrack of a Life, a bilingual selection of Fagiani’s work (Legas, 2023), and Missing Madonnas (Bordighera Press, 2018). Lisella’s work has been anthologized in the bilingual anthology Di là mare/Across the Sea: Contemporary Italian and Italian-American Poetry (Bordighera Press, 2026); Stronger than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022); and NYC through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here (Blue Light Press, 2022), among others volumes. Her poetry has been translated into Albanian, Italian, and Korean. Lisella curates the Italian American Writers Association’s literary series and is poetry editor for the literary and scholarly review Voices in Italian Americana (VIA). She has led poetry workshops for underserved communities for various institutions, including the Queens Public Library system, the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Heights & Hills, and The Noguchi Museum. Lisella served as poet laureate of Queens, New York, from 2015 to 2019. She has lived in Astoria, Queens, for forty years.  Read about Maria Lisella’s 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship project. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Perry Nicholas reading his poem “I’ve Forgotten the Moon” from his newest book, Island of Your Heart. Perry S. Nicholas is a professor emeritus of English at SUNY Erie Community College in Buffalo, N.Y., where he was awarded the 2008 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities and the 2011 President’s Award for Classroom Instruction. He received the SGA’s Outstanding Teacher Award on two occasions. He has been a guest lecturer at Daemen College, Villa Maria College,  Buffalo State College, Niagara County Community College, Medaille College, and at New York College in Athens, Greece. Perry has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010. His poems have appeared in Common Ground Review, Literary House Review, Caesura, Word Worth, Silver Birch Press, Snapdragon, Verse-Virtual, Slant, Feile-Festa, Louisiana Literature, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Chest, The Healing Muse,  New York Quarterly, Great Lakes Review, Chronogram, and AHI.  His poems have appeared on  over twenty occasions in the Buffalo News. He has published approximately 200 poems in print and online. They also appear in the anthologies Right Here, Right Now, Resurrection of a Sunflower, Flash in the Dark and A Celebration of Western New York Poets. In February, 2013, Perry judged the Just Buffalo Annual Poetry Contest and the New York Poetry Out Loud competition at SUNY Erie. In 2013, he read in Greenwich Village's Cornelia Cafe in NYC. In 2016, he was featured at the well-known Cafe Lena in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. In 2017, he directed the Writers Workshop for Just Buffalo. He has edited local anthologies and written many book reviews for fellow poets.  His first full-length book, The River of You, was published in September 2009 by FootHills Publishing. His second book of poetry, What the World Sees, was published by Saddle Road Press in July 2011. His third book, Small Crafts, was published by The Writer’s Den in March, 2012, and Perry's fourth book, Beginnings: Poems to Greece and Back, was released in early December, 2012. Perry has put out five chapbooks, Ancient History, in 2013 , Like Trying to Explain, in 2014, Emergency Visit in 2015, The Poet Upstairs in 2017 and Laundry  in 2018. His poem "The Last Night We Heard Bob Dylan Play" was nominated for the Best of the Net in 2018.  Perry's book, Why I Learned to Spell was  published by The Writer's Den in 2019 and his newest book, as a man in the moon, was published by The Writer's Den in 2020.  His new chapbbook The Unveiling was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024. Perry Nicholas has co-hosted the Lewiston Arts Café in Lewiston, NY, the Screening Room Poetry Series, Empire State College's Poetry Series,  the Center for Inquiry Poetry Series, the Buffalo Corner Series, and international readings at the Italian Cultural Center. Perry has read his poetry in Schenectady, New Paltz, Albany, Plymouth,  Woodstock, Saratoga Springs, NYC, N.Y., Athens, Greece, and most-recently via Zoom for Stockbridge, MA and Queens College Libraries.  Learn more at www.perrynicholas.com/ This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Dane Cervine reading "IN ANY EVENT" by Dorianne Laux.  You can read "IN ANY EVENT" by Dorianne Laux on the SALT Project's website.  Dane Cervine is a Poet, Zen practitioner, and Therapist who lives in Santa Cruz, California along the Monterey Bay coast. Explore this website for his poetry, essays, published books, anthology & video selections, including free samples of his work. Dane Cervine’s latest book is a contemplative travelogue titled DEEP TRAVEL - At home in the [Burning] World  (published by Saddle Road Press). Other books include The World Is God’s Language (published by Sixteen Rivers Press),  Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California.  Learn more at www.danecervine.com. Dorianne Laux is the author of several collections of poetry, including What We Carry (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Smoke (2000); Facts about the Moon (2005), chosen by the poet Ai as winner of the Oregon Book Award and also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Book of Men (2011), which was awarded the Paterson Prize; and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected (2019). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been a Pushcart Prize winner.    This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Andrea Deeken reading her poem “On Kindness." Andrea Deeken (she/they) is the author of Mother Kingdom, winner of the 2021 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Prize. Her writing has appeared in a variety of journals including The Blue Mountain Review, Mom Egg Review, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A 2025 Regional Arts & Culture Council grant recipient, Deeken is the cofounder of Lesbian Poets Society, an inclusive podcast about queerness and creativity, currently in production. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.  Find Andrea and her fellow cohost Darla Himeles online (Instagram) @lesbian.poets.society or send them an email at [email protected].  Learn more about Andrea at www.andreadeeken.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Karren LaLonde Alenier reading her poem "how we hold on" from her latest book by the same name, how we hold on, from Broadstone Books. Karren Lalonde Alenier is a poet, librettist and literary Leader She is editor of From the Belly: Poets Respond to  Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and author of eight collections of poetry. Looking for Divine Transportation was 2002 winner of the Towson University Prize for literature. The Anima of Paul Bowles was 2016 top staff pick at Boston’s Grolier Books. Her eighth collection how we hold on launched spring 2021. She also authored The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas, a book that includes her essays and opera reviews first published in Scene4 Magazine. Her opera with William Banfield, Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, premiered 2005 by Encompass New Opera Theater under direction of Nancy Rhodes. It was favorably reviewed by Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times.  Karren promotes other people's poetry with publication and public programs through The Word Works. Learn more at alenier.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Brooke Morgan reading "Ragged Island" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

**SENSATIVE CONTENT WARNING: This episode references childhood sexual abuse. If you or someone you know needs support, call or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline 1-800-422-4453. Please take care while listening.** Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features teen poet Moth Allen reading his poem "Your Hands." This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

**SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING: This episode references suicide. If you or someone you know needs support, call or text 988 in the U.S. Take care while listening.** Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features highschooler Bella Phinney reading her poem called "My Friend." This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Emily Pérez reading "Wildlife" by Ellen Bass.  The poem "Wildlife" by Ellen Bass is available to read on the Poetry Foundation website. Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize and a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. She co-edited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, also a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, she has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and Summer Literary Seminars. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her poems and criticism have appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Diode, RHINO, The Guardian, LARB, The Georgia Review, and DIAGRAM. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family. Learn more at emilyperez.org. Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear  frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. Learn more at ellenbass.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Susana H. Case reading “What Do Women Want?” by Kim Addonizio. The poem, "What Do Women Want?" by Kim Addonizio is available to read on the Poetry Foundation website.  Susana H. Case, Ph. D., is the author of nine books of poetry. If This Isn’t Love, from Broadstone Books (2023) is her newest. The Damage Done, from Broadstone Books, won a Pinnacle Award for Best Poetry Book. Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books (2020), also won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, as well as a NYC Big Book Awards Distinguished Favorite, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Drugstore Blue, from Five Oaks Press, won an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY). She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. The Scottish Café was reprinted as an English-Polish edition by the University of Opole Press and as an English-Ukrainian edition by Slapering Hol Press. Case’s poems appear in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Fourteen Hills, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, and RHINO, among others. Aside from Polish and Ukrainian, she has been published via translation into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Case is co-editor, with Margo Taft Stever, of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press (2022) which was a finalist for an American Book Fest award and a International Book Award in the anthology category and was Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She is co-editor with Margo Taft Stever and Sandra Yannone of Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic, Salmon Poetry, 2026. Susana co-curates, with Lynn McGee (series founder), Sandy Yannone, and Carolyne Wright, the W-E (West-East) Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic and Beyond series which features writers from both coasts and many other regions. She recently retired as Professor from the New York Institute of Technology in New York City, where she taught for thirty-eight years. Learn more at: susanahcase.com Kim Addonizio is the author of nine poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones.   Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton). Learn more at: www.kimaddonizio.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

**Content Warning: This episode features a poem about a mass shooting. Please take care while listening.** Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Holly Iglesias reading "The Hispanic Invasion of Texas," by María Esquinca, from the collection Where Heaven Sinks.  María Esqunica's poem, "This Hispanic Invasion of Texas," can be found on the Michigan Quarterly Review website. Holly Iglesias has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Edward Albee Foundation. Her poetry collections are Souvenirs of Shrunken World, Angles of Approach, and Sleeping Things. She is working on an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments that is tentatively entitled Theories of Flight. María Esquinca is a Xicana educator, poet and journalist. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico and grew up in El Paso, Texas. She currently teaches newcomers who are recent immigrants at San Francisco International High School. Her debut collection, Where Heaven Sinks was the 2024 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize winner, and was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera. Learn more at: mariaesquinca.org   This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Elizabeth Sylvia. Elizabeth reads six poems form her new collection, Scythe: "Invitation to Marie Antoinette," "Pouf," "The Scythe," "On Learning that Kim Kardashian Exceeded her Water Allowance by 232,000 Gallons in June," "PSL" and "The Sitting: Marie Antoinette and her Children." Elizabeth Sylvia's second collection, Scythe (2026), is out now from River River Books. Her first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. Her chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties (2025), available from Ballerini Books, was a runner-up for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. Elizabeth has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by the Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, Thirty West, Rare Swan and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. She has received fellowships from the New York Public Library, the West Chester University Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Elizabeth has led workshops at MassPoetry, Lit Youngstown, and Tell it Slant. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize. Elizabeth grew up on Martha’s Vineyard and currently teaches in Southeastern Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and extravagantly demanding garden. Learn more at: elizabethsylviapoet.net This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Kathryn Petruccelli reading "Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee. You can read "Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee on the Poetry Foundation's website. Kathryn Petruccelli is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated poet with roots in spoken word and a degree in teaching English language learners. She is also the host of Melody or Witchcraft, a podcast where a poet reads a work of their own and an Emily Dickinson poem of their choosing that contributed to their work. The podcast is based on the idea that poetry can be a launchpoint to discuss the pressing issues of today.  Kathryn's poetry has appeared in places like the Massachusetts Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, About Place Journal, and Anacapa Review. You can find her prose at places like SweetLit, Switch, Fictive Dream, The Los Angeles Review, and Wrong Turn Lit. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland which she enjoys greatly besides missing her former job as tour guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum. She teaches online, pay-what-you-can workshops that aim to build community. Come say hello via her website: poetroar.com, or at her Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month bonus episode features Owen Lewis reading an untitled poem by Avram Sutzkever.  Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry, Marriage Map, Sometimes Full of Daylight, Field Light, and most recently Prayer of Six Wings, along with three chapbooks. best man was the recipient of the 2016 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize of the New England Poetry Club. Field Light was a “Must Read” selection of the Massachusetts Books Awards. Major prizes include: The E.E. Cummings Prize (2024), The Rumi Prize for Poetry/Arts & Letters (2023), The Guernsey International Poetry Prize (2023), and The International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (2016). Other prizes include: Second Prize 2018 Wigtown (Scotland) International Poetry Competition and Finalist, 2017 Pablo Neruda Award. His poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Poetry Wales, The Mississippi Review, Southward, The Four Way Review, Cider Press Review, and Arts and Letters. He is a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and lectures extensively on topics of Narrative Medicine. Learn more at: www.owenlewispoet.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

**Content warning: The last poem of this episode discusses gun violence in schools. Take care while listening.** Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Ken Haas. Ken reads seven of his poems: "Stone Fruit," "Speak English," "Reading at the Country Fair," "The Grill," "When Pickleball Saved the World," "The Wreck in Numbers" and "Comfort for the Ages." Ken Haas grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City but has lived for 50 years now in San Francisco, where he works in healthcare. He received an AB in History and Literature at Harvard College, and received an MA in English literature at the University of Sussex, U.K., where he wrote his thesis on Wallace Stevens. A life-long poetry writer, Ken has spent the majority of his career as a hi-tech executive and biotech venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. His first poetry book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, as well as a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women. Ken has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, and serves on the Board of the Community of Writers. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies. Check out the Penn Sound poetry archive mentioned in this episode at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/. Learn more about Ken at www.kenhaas.org. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features interdisciplinary artist and writer Summer J. Hart. Summer reads six poems: "More Rabbits" by Claire Wahmanholm and "8.5 x 11”  by Erin Marie Lynch, and her own poems "Dear Violet," "Salt for the Stain," "There's Something Irregular About this Rain" and "In the Story 'Survival' by Rita Joe." Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of two books of poetry: Boomhouse  (2023, The 3rd Thing Press), which won the 2024 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and What Came Down in the Smoke (forthcoming in 2026 from JackLeg Press). Her creative work has been supported by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MacDowell, NYSCA/NYFA, and Vermont Studio Center. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press),  Allium, Ballast, Bedfellows, Grist, Heavy Feather Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Northern New England Review, Tyger Quarterly, Waxwing, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media artworks have been featured in exhibitions across the United States. They are included in the permanent collections of The University of Hartford and The University of Southern Maine.  Summer is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation. Learn more at www.summerjhart.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

**SENSATIVE CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains depictions of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233 or visit www.thehotline.org.** Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Kimberly Ann Priest. She reads “Gomorrah,” “The Chickens," “Cake” and “First Visit to the Sister Survivors Exhibit” of her own work, as well as "Eat this Bread" by Pádraig Ó Tuama and "Kisser" by Pascale Petit. Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and photographer whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of tether & lung(Texas Review Press 2025) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021), finalist for the American Best Book Awards. Her chapbooks include The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions 2022), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press 2021), still life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP 2017). Kimberly's writing and scholarly interests are deeply focused on gender-based trauma, domestic ecologies, eco-poetics, eco-spirituality, ecofeminism, women's studies, neurodivergence studies, classic film studies, narrative justice, arts-based research, and writing for therapeutic purposes.  Hailing from the working-class world of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Kimberly earned her BA (Regent University) and MA (Central Michigan University) degrees in English Language & Literature and her MFA (New England College) in Poetry/Nonfiction mid-life while raising two children to young adulthood. She is the great-granddaughter of Scottish immigrants and miners on her father's side, and the granddaughter of a traveling preacher on her mother's side. Her family history is a well-spring of Biblical lore and MacGregor clan legends, equally fraught with displacement, religious abuses, and troubled attachments. Growing up on the banks of Lake Superior, she spent her youth hiding among the rocks along the lakeshore to read scores of books during the warmer seasons while working as a carhop at a local 1950s-style drive-in restaurant.  A survivor of gendered violence and an active outdoorswoman, she has participated in initiatives to increase awareness concerning sexual assault, survivorship, and healing through nature and artistic expression. Her literary interests include women poets and storytellers, stories that explore religious imaginations and spirituality, feminist narratives of trauma, migration, endangered species, and rewilding, and travel and nature writing. She has received fellowships and residencies from Monson Arts, SAFTA, Ghost Ranch, and Proximity Writer's House, and she has served as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications and Black Earth Institute as well as an associate editor for six years with the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry.  Winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize and a Brooklyn Girls Books prize, her work has appeared in literary journals such as Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Salamander, RHINO, Chicago Quarterly Review,, and The Birmingham Poetry Review. Her work has also been selected for Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and appears in the second edition of the textbook Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic. Currently, Kimberly is an assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, and a guest teaching artist at The Telling Room in Portland, Maine. She is a member of the Association of Writers and Publishers, Poets & Writers, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the National Association for Poetry Therapy. She met her husband during the five years she worked at a summer camp and lived part-time in Maine hiking the state's breathtaking landscape. They eloped to Scotland and live together in Maine. Learn more about Kimberly Ann at www.kimberlyannpriest.com.   This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Jeri Theriault. Jeri read's her poems "12 Gold Street," "Route 201, Fairfield," "My Father on Iwo Jima," "Communion," "Self-Portrait as Homestead," and "[application] transport." Jeri Theriault is a Franco-American poet who grew up in Waterville, Maine, and graduated from Colby College, later earning degrees from USM (MS in Instructional Leadership) and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA in Poetry). Her teaching career spanned thirty-four years, including seven years in Prague, six of them as English Department chair at the International School of Prague. She lives now in South Portland with my husband, the composer, Philip Carlsen.  Learn more at www.jeritheriault.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Stu Kestenbaum. He reads his poems "Prayer in the Strip Mall, Bangor, Maine," "In Praise of Hands," "Theology," "Song of Ascents," and "Holding the Light." Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community. In 2024, he and visual artist Susan Webster published A Quiet Book, collaborations in writing and visual art (Brynmorgen Press). He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The New York Times Magazine. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future. Stuart was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts. Learn more at stuartkestenbaum.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Megan Grumbling. She reads her poems "The Heist," "Good Digging," "Raking Near the Great Works," "Short Shorts," "Persephone's Lark Song," "Persephone's Light Song," "Help is On the Way," and "Scarecrow." Megan Grumbling writes poetry, criticism and essays, and dramatic works, and serves as an editor, teacher, and writing mentor. Her second poetry collection, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, launched in fall of 2020 from Acre Books. Her first collection, Booker's Point (UNT 2016), was awarded the Vassar Miller Prize and the Maine Book Award for Poetry. Her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Award from the Robert Frost Foundation, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and has been included in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, the New York Times Poetry Pairing Series, and Verse Daily. As a filmmaker, she is co-director/producer with David Camlin of We Are the Warriors (2023), which follows members of a Maine high school community as they grapple with ingrained settler narratives about their Native American mascot and the difficult conversation of whether to retire the image. We Are The Warriors was awarded the Tourmaline Prize for best feature at the 2023 Maine International Film Festival. Megan also wrote and co-directed the short film and cultural allegory Carrying Place, a Sisters Grumbling production. Megan is also the librettist of the spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, a co-creation with the late composer Denis Nye, and of which her newest collection is an expansion. This experimental opera had its world premiere production by Hinge/Works Modern Opera in 2016 at SPACE Gallery, in Portland, Maine. She now works regularly with composer Marianna Filippi on a variety of environmentally-themed new music compositions, including a synesthetic exploration of a day in the life of an octopus and a work for 8 cellos and chorus written in the voice of a glacier. She has written and directed interactive street theater for the sea level rise consciousness-raising group King Tide Party and collaborated on site-specific performances about healing and sound. Her dramatic and operatic work as co- founder of Hinge/Works has been staged as part of the PortFringe Festival, the Sacred and Profane Festival, and the Belfast Poetry Festival. Megan also edits the weekly poetry column Deep Water in the Portland Press Herald; serves as Reviews Editor for The Café Review, a poetry and arts journal; and wrote theater and film criticism for the Portland Phoenix from 2004 until the alt-weekly’s sad final demise in 2024. She teaches at the University of New England and Southern Maine Community College, frequently leads writing workshops and tutorials, and offers manuscript consultations and editing services to a range of authors. She earned a Master’s Degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University’s School of Journalism, and studied oral history, ethnography, and American Studies as an undergraduate at The Evergreen State College. Megan’s work is strongly influenced by the natural world, stories, and documentary modes. She has written a portrait-in-verse of an old Maine woodsman; explored the significance of gold in America through the voices of three historical figures; and contemplated how we inhabit the vessels of a neighborhood, a body, and the deep and precarious blue. Learn more at megangrumbling.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Jeffrey Thomson. Jeff reads his poems "What Are You Reading?," "The Tale of the Well of Mary," "The Well of the Staff," "The Glass Man, Assisi" and "The Road to Damascus."  Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of ten books, including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory, Half/Life: New and Selected Poems, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and Birdwatching in Wartime. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features poet and Acadia National Park trail crew member and Poet Laureate, Christian Barter. Christian reads his poems "McVie," "Acadia," "To Autumn," "Reading Myself," and "Errand." Christian Barter’s fourth book of poetry, The Ends, is published by Littoral Books. He has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Maine Literary Award for Poetry, the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, and he was the Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park. For over thirty years he has worked for the Acadia trail crew as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and supervisor.   Learn more at www.christianbarterpoetry.org.     This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Cynthia Reeves began her writing life over thirty years ago as a poet, but she found that her poetry more often than not drifted into narrative. She gravitates toward forms that lie in the gray area between poetry and prose—prose poems and flash fiction. She’s the author of three award-winning books: the novel The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing, September 2024), the novel-in-stories Falling Through the New World (Gold Wake Press 2024), and the novella Badlands (Miami University Press 2007). Reeves’s short stories, poetry, and essays have been widely published. Most recently, three of her Maine-based poems appear in Echoes in the Fog: Reflections on the Liminal Spaces of Maine’s Coast (12 Willows Press). A Hawthornden Fellow, she’s been awarded residencies to the Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, Spitsbergen Artists Residency, Art & Science in the Field, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s MFA program. She serves on the board at Millay House Rockland and lives in Camden, Maine.Learn more at: www.cynthiareeveswriter.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features poet and Acadia National Park trail crew member and Poet Laureate, Christian Barter. Christian reads his poems "McVie," "Acadia," "To Autumn," "Reading Myself," and "Errand." Arisa White is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. Post Pardon: The Opera marked Arisa’s debut as a librettist, and the libretto is forthcoming from Ecstatic Motion Press in 2026.  Her poetry is widely published, and her collections have been nominated for both the NAACP (N-double-A-C-P) Image Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She has also won the Per Diem Poetry Prize, the Maine Literary Award, the Nautilus Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, the Golden Crown Literary Award, and the Airlie Press Prize. The poem installation, look after your heart, is permanently displayed at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the Community Advisory Board for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Learn more at arisawhite.com This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Claire Millikin, a poet, scholar, and educator. She reads five of her poems: “After Ballet,” “Nightwork,” “Carolina Birds,” “Cicada Door,” and “When I Was Blonde.” Claire Millikin is a poet and long-distance runner originally from Georgia (USA), and now lives in coastal Maine. The author of ten poetry collections, including Magicicada, a book of poems about juvenile solitary confinement and winner of the 2024 Foreword Indies Award for Poetry, Millikin’s recognitions also include an Independent Press Award Distinguished Favorite and the WB Yeats’ Society Prize. Claire teaches art history and writing for the University of Maine system and for the Maine Media Workshops and College. Learn more at: www.claireraymond.org. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

** SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING: This episode references suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the U.S., or visit 988lifeline.org** Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Maya Williams (ey/em, they/them, she/her), whose work covers suicide awareness, mental health, faith, entertainment media, grief, interpersonal relationships, intimate partner violence, and healing. Ey reads eir poems: "On Building an Assignment at Birth," "On Building a Shrine," "Feminine Morbidity, " and "For Wanda Coleman's 'Wicked Enchantment'". Maya Williams is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow, a Creative Fellow of the University of New England's Maine Women Writers Collection, and was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine  for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Maya's debut poetry collection, Judas & Suicide, is available through Game Over Books. Eir second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date, is available through Harbor Editions.  Maya's third poetry collection, a chapbook: What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? , is available via Garden Party Collective.  Their fourth poetry collection, a chapbook: Feminine Morbidity is available through The Headlight Review.  Maya's collections are a finalist of a New England Book Award, a finalist of a Maine Literary Award, a winner of Garden Party Collective's chapbook contest, and a winner of The Headlight Review's chapbook contest respectively. Ey were also a recipient of the Maine Humanities Council's Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024.  Catch Maya hosting the hybrid open mic series Port Veritas on Tuesday nights and hosting the hybrid writing workshop series at Novel Maine on Sunday mornings. You can support Maya's poetry on eir Patreon page and follow eir work at mayawilliamspoet.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. In this episode, Dr. Therí Pickens reads three works from her poetry collection, What Had Happened Was: "On Losing; A Hypothesis," "Potential Ode or Elegy Out My Window," and "I meet a man with a stutter."  Dr. Therí A. Pickens received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She is a poet-scholar who focuses on Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature and Disability Studies. Dr. Pickens is currently the Charles A Dana Professor of English & Africana at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí A. Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling.  Learn more at: www.tpickens.org This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Welcome to Poetry Medicine for the Soul, a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features John Reinhart, a poet whose work ranges from dark sci-fi to humorous scenes from his family life. He reads his poems "You Learn Something Everyday," "Dreamweaving," and "Unhappy Meals."  John Reinhart has been awarded the Dark Poetry Scholarship from the Horror Writers Association, Reinhart's poems and short works have been published internationally in print and online. He has been nominated for the Rhysling Award for best science-fiction poem in the previous year and the Dwarf Stars Award for the best short sci-fi poem of the previous year. He has won the Poetry Nook weekly contest seven times. Reinhart's eight books to date span a wide range of his work, ranging from dark sci-fi/horror to humorous scenes from his family life, to experimental word compositions, and more serious social commentary.  You can earn more on John's website: https://home.hampshire.edu/~jcr00/reinhart.html Sign up for John Reinhart's Patreon content here: https://www.patreon.com/johnreinhart   This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting  poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. In this episode, Kristen Lindquist reads three of her haibun (haiku-prose hybrid) poems: "Strangers on a Plane," "Natural History," and "The Way In." Kristen Lindquist attended Middlebury College in Vermont and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. Her poetry and other writings have appeared in such venues as Down East magazine, Maine Times, and Bangor Daily News, as well as in many literary/haiku journals and anthologies. Her haiku chapbook It Always Comes Back was a winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award. Her haiku collection ISLAND, published in 2023, was runner-up for the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award. Learn more at www.kristenlindquist.com, where you can sign up for Kristen's daily haiku newsletter. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie that invites poets to read, explore, and celebrate poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, this summer, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 32 features Meg Weston reading two poems by Aimee Nezhukumatahil: “When You are Near, I Turn into a Baja Fairyduster” and “What I Learned in Greenland.” Meg and John then discuss the question: What does national poetry month mean to you? This is the last episode of Season 5. Poetry Medicine for the Soul will back in the fall with Season 6.  Meg Weston is a poet, non-fiction writer, and photographer with passion for the geological processes that shape the earth and the stories that shape our lives. She has an MFA from Lesley University. As co-founder of The Poets Corner, and the Camden Festival of Poetry, and a board member of Millay House Rockland, Meg actively supports the poetry community. Images can be seen on her photography website, www.volcanoes.com.  Meg Weston's poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her publications include a poetry collection, Magma Intrusions, published by Kelsay Books in 2023, a self-published chapbook, Letters from the White Queen. and a collaborative collection with poet Margaret Haberman, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie that invites poets to read, explore, and celebrate poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, this summer, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 31 features Annaliese Jakimides reading “What Seems Like Joy” by Kaveh Akbar, and “Feather” by Margaret Atwood. Annaliese and John then discuss the question: What does national poetry month mean to you? Annaliese Jakimides has been cited in national competitions by poets laureate and other notable writers. Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her prose and poetry have been published in many magazines, anthologies, and journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal and Southeast Review. She’s a member of MWPA’s community advisory board and cofounder of the Belfast Poetry Festival. After decades of living in the shadow of Mt. Katahdin in a town of 160, pumping water by hand, she now lives in an apartment in a small Maine city overlooking a library and writes in a closet. Learn more at www.annaliesejakimides.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie that invites poets to read, explore, and celebrate poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, this summer, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 30 features Mike Bove reading “The Jewel” by James Wright and “Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz. Mike and John then discuss the question: What does national poetry month mean to you? Mike Bove is the author of four books of poetry, most recently EYE. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and others. He was a two-time finalist for a Maine Literary Award and won the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest in 2021. In 2024 he served as Writer-in-Residence at Acadia National Park. Currently, he is editor of Hole in the Head Review, a biannual journal of poetry. Mike lives with his family in Portland, Maine where he was born and raised, and is Professor of English at Southern Maine Community College.  Learn more at: www.mikebove.com This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie that invites poets to read, explore, and celebrate poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, this summer, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 29 features Katherine Berry reading “Nox borealis” by Campbell McGrath and her own poem “Northern Lights.” Katherine and John then discuss the question: What does national poetry month mean to you? Katherine Hagopian Berry (she/her) is the author of Mast Year (Littoral Books 2020), LandTrust (NatureCulture, 2022) and Orbit (Toad Hall Editions, 2023). Katherine has appeared in literary magazines, including Café Review, SWWIM, and Feral, in the Portland Press Herald, on Maine NPR and in multiple anthologies. Her next collection, Handfast, is forthcoming from NatureCulture Books. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie that invites poets to read, explore, and celebrate poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, this summer, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 28 features Rosa Lane reading “Wild nights- Wild nights!” by Emily Dickinson and her own poem, “French Sardines,” from her new poetry collection Called Back, which just received the 2025 Maine Literary Book Award. Rosa and John then discuss the question: What does national poetry month mean to you? Rosa Lane is author of four poetry collections including Called Back, published by Tupelo Press in fall 2024; Chouteau’s Chalk, winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019;Tiller North, winner of the National Indie Excellence Award, published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2016; and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook.  Her work was named Best of Poetry for the 2024 Geminga Prize, chosen as winner of the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, and selected finalist for the 2023 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition among other awards. Rosa Lane’s poems have appeared in Cloudbank, Five Points, Nimrod, RHINO, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Learn more at: www.rosalane.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie inviting poets to read, explore, and celebrate poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, this summer Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 27 features Lauren Saxon reading “Uptown, Minneapolis, Minnesota” by Hieu Minh Nguyen. Lauren and John then discuss the question: What does national poetry month mean to you? Lauren Saxon is a queer, Black poet and engineer living in Portland, ME. She loves her cats, her Subaru, and being chronically online. Lauren’s work is featured in Barrelhouse, Empty Mirror, Across the Margin, Homology Lit, and more. Her debut chapbook, You’re My Favorite, won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Book of Poetry, and is out now with Thirty West Publishing. Learn more at: www.laurenmsaxon.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie that invites poets to read, explore, and celebrate poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Season 5, Episode 26 features Kristen Case reading “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens.   Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. She is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe, and three books of poetry - most recently, Daphne. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers. Most recently, the Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. She lives in Maine.  Learn more at: www.kristencase.com This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast hosted by John Gillespie that invites poets to share and examine poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating.  Episode 25 features Jefferson Navicky reading “Life Status” by Adrian Blevins. Jefferson and John then explore the question: What does National Poetry Month mean to you?  Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He earned his M.F.A. from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics at Naropa University. He is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), a Finalist for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021) won the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Jefferson’s work has received several acknowledgments and awards, including an American Rescue Plan/Maine Project Grant, a Maine Arts Commission grant, and three Maine Literary Awards. His plays have been produced throughout New England. Jefferson is proud to be a member of Maine’s literary arts community and is active in several volunteer boards, committees, and community projects. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection. Learn more at: www.jeffersonnavicky.com. . This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul, a podcast hosted by John Gillespie, invites poets to share and examine poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 24 features Margaret Haberman reading “Rounding Ballast Key” by George Murphy. Margaret and John then explore the question: What does National Poetry Month mean to you? Margaret A. Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. Her poems have appeared in the Island Journal, the journals Spiritus, and kerning/ a space from here. Her poems have also been selected for the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here. Margaret and Meg Weston co-authored a book of poems, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems, which came out in 2024.  This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 23 features Kate Kearns and Gibson Fay-Leblanc. Kate reads “Love Poem with Faults” and “Mushrooms Can Consume Nuclear Waste.” Gibson reads “To My Wife” and “Lorca says, the duende loves the rim of the wound”. Kate Kearns is the author of You Are Ruining My Loneliness (Littoral Books, 2023), and a chapbook called How to Love an Introvert (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Maine Women Magazine, the Maine Sunday Telegram “Deep Waters” section, and on Maine Public Radio’s “Poems from Here”. Her poems have also been published in Salamander, Peregrine, Northern New England Review, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. Kate was a finalist for the 2024 Charles Simic Poetry Prize and the 2024 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. She earned her MFA from Lesley University and BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Learn more at: www.katekearns.com. Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers. His second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, The Literary Review, FIELD, Poetry Northwest and Orion. Gibson’s prose has appeared in Guernica, Kenyon Review, Publishers Weekly, Slice, and other places.  He served as the City of Portland’s fifth Poet Laureate, ending a three-year term in 2018. His projects included Written, Spoken, Rapped, a multimedia website that he collaborated on with poet Wesley McNair and that is aimed at high school teachers and students interested in writing poetry, and “Deep Water,” a column that features a poem each Sunday in the Maine Sunday Telegram and now continues with poet Megan Grumbling as editor.  With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities including Fordham, Haystack, and University of Southern Maine, and helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks Artist Colony. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family. Learn more at: www.gibsonfayleblanc.com This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul, a podcast hosted by John Gillespie, invites poets to share and examine poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 22 features Sarah V. Schweig reading an untitled poem from 1918 by Marina Tsvetaeva and “A CHILDREN’S STORY” by Louise Glück. Sarah and John then explore the question: What does National Poetry Month mean to you? Sarah V. Schweig’s second book, The Ocean in the Next Room, won the Jake Adam York Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in January 2025. Her first book, Take Nothing with You, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2016. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Tin House, and the Yale Review, among others. Her critical essays have appeared at Public Seminar, Tourniquet Review, and elsewhere. She works as an editor and is writing a philosophy dissertation for her PhD at the New School for Social Research on the value of poetry. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and son. Learn more at: www.sarahvschweig.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul, a podcast hosted by John Gillespie, invites poets to share and examine poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 21 features James Davis, reading “The Cities of the Plain” by Mona Van Duyn. James and John then explore the question: What does National Poetry Month mean to you? James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poems have been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio, as well as in publications like Best New Poets, The Sewanee Review, Copper Nickel, Five Points, and Pleiades. He lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches English at the University of North Texas. Find him online at jamesdavispoet.com This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul, a podcast hosted by John Gillespie, invites poets to share and examine poetry. While the 2025 National Poetry Month is over, Poetry Medicine for the Soul is still celebrating. Episode 20 features Andrea Deeken reading two poems: "Portrait as Bougainvillea Gone Derelict Over Chain Link" by Karen Rigby, and "We Are of a Tribe" by  Alberto Ríos. Andrea and John then explore the question: What does National Poetry Month mean to you?   Andrea Deeken (she/they) is the author of the chapbook, Mother Kingdom, winner of the 2021 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition and 2022 International Book Awards finalist. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of journals including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Beyond Queer Words, The Blue Mountain Review, erbacce Journal UK, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. A former book editor, she has worked for Multnomah County Library for nearly two decades. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. Learn more about Andrea at andreadeeken.com This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul, a podcast hosted by John Gillespie, invites poets to share and examine poetry. This episode is part of our mini series celebrating the 2025 National Poetry Month. Episode 19 features Angela Dribben reading "Animal Instinct" by Raye Hendrix, from her book What Good is Heaven. Angela and John then explore the question: What does National Poetry Month mean to you?  Angela Dribben is an astrologer, editor, and writer living in the Appalachian region of Virginia. She’s on the Teaching Artist roster with Virginia Commission for the Arts. She co-founded Great Goodness—a YouTube show highlighting the good creatives put into the world. Her debut collection is Everygirl (Main Street Rag). Her writing can be found at Orion, Los Angeles Review of Books, Westchester Review, and many other places. Find Angela at www.twodogtarot.com and @Great_Goodness on YouTube. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 18 celebrates National Poetry Month. This episode features Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma reading multiple poems from her forthcoming collection, Death Fluorescence. Julia Bouwsma is Maine’s sixth state Poet Laureate. Julia lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. She is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate, currently serving a term from 2021 to 2026, and is the author of three poetry collections: the forthcoming Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, June 2025), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017).  She is also the librettist for the short chamber opera, Ghost Apples, created in collaboration with composer Nathan Davis and to be performed by the Halcyon Quartet in the fall of 2025. Bouwsma’s honors include a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and two Maine Literary Awards. Her work can be found in various publications including Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, Plume, and Poetry Daily. She has taught in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington, serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and works as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME. Learn more at www.juliabouwsma.com/ This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 17 features Angela Dribben reading “In my throat” and Caren reading “Not About Weather or Onions or the Poem You Wrote Twenty-four Years Ago Today.”   In my throat By Angela Dribben Another life. Lungs of the forest. Roots pulse comforts to one another. The first one to die bequeaths all they once lived for. Were we once   trees? We clamber to find one another. Is it our palms listening, held hot to bark—one risen rough and rigid, one smooth as the Earth’s tilt. A trust   of one another before we ever pressed together flesh, mine to yours. You’re the only one I’ve never known how to leave. The only one   i ever rooted into. My anchor. My source. Your Magnolia bark the antidote to my anxiety. Your seed my pain   killer, fever reducer. Grandiflora. Salve for soft-bellies. i, your Oak. My medicine your astringent. Your remedy.   My canopy your shelter, come October a mantel of auburn and gold to hang your worries on. When steeped & distilled your conelike flowers   ward off Autumnal fever—i am your barn, your barrel, your ship, your bed. This pulsing through the earth. This way we ache   for one another. Otherworld, Underworld, in another life. Our ancestors Hickory, Poplar, Dogwood, Redbud, medicines of the earth, muladhara of the earth. Hyphae calling us home.   Not About Weather or Onions or the Poem You Wrote Twenty-four Years Ago Today                       (After reading Ted Kooser’s poem, “March 11” in Winter Morning Walks) by Caren Stuart   With the light of this day so brilliantly bright and the tease of these clouds so delicately white, and the dancing of this sky such a breezy delight, it’s the blueness of the blue in the height of this high that’s impossible to pen, with its piercing infinity so inviting the seeking of my soul and mind’s eye today. I have set a timer for an hour of concrete writing in this room full of windows and hot tea and candles and a plate full of slices of peanut buttered Honeycrisp apple. With the whispering warm of mid-March settling deep into soil here, teasing the delicate sleep of small bulbs to stir into stretching even their slenderest, tenderest shoots into growing up into sweet as scallion or savory as onion, i feel so ensconced in my own so seemingly fragile, so delicately layered, so almost translucent, papery skins. This is mostly to say that this sky is so full of itself, it is filling me up. Up. And away. Today. And yesterday. And tomorrow and back into all of the yesterdays ever. Yours. Or mine. Yours AND mine. It’s that good... even though I can’t begin to begin to write adequately about any of this... ever... at all. You wrote a poem: March 11 (twenty-four years ago today) I received it and this:   all of this... Angela Dribben is an astrologer, editor, and writer living in the Appalachian region of Virginia. She writes to gain a better understanding of anything and everything and to connect with others. Reading was her first best friend. She’s been published in a myriad of journals and magazines. She teaches generative writing classes centered on healing through the Virginia Commission for the Arts and independently. Reach out to her, find out about classes, share your writing with her. She can be found at www.twodogtarot.com and on Medium @angeladribben. Caren Stuart is a lifelong North Carolinian currently living with her husband in the wilds of Chatham County where she reads poetry daily and writes poetry almost daily. As often as possible she wanders and ponders the woods, creates random art and craft works, and helps bring online and in person poetry and art experiences to others. More than sixty of her poems have appeared in assorted journals, anthologies, and collections of award-winning poems. Find Caren on facebook as herself and on Instagram as @convolutednotionsbycarenstuart. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie.  Episode 16 features Kathryn Petruccelli reading “Whales” and Paola Bruni reading “Limoncini".   Whales By Kathryn Petruccelli I have a photo of my mother in a gray hoodie on a boat—a whale watching trip. We see a few tails at a distance. Regardless, for the five-hour duration, she holds her camera to her eye, with the exception of this moment, when I take her picture.   In another version, the boat rocks wildly in the wake of all the breaching; squeals from excited tourists create a din. I have to shout to my mother. She turns toward me, my photo a brief interruption to her agenda: she clicks and clicks at the splashing.   Let’s say this time the water is glass. Far off on the horizon, what might be a small spray from a blowhole, maybe a second. A pod moving off. My mother is nonetheless enthralled, wind buffeting us. She anchors herself, turns and smiles, and that’s when I snap the picture.   What I left out before is that the boat zooms to a likely spot before the captain cuts the motor. Soon, a female humpback sidles up next to us and goes to sleep. The crew calls it “extraordinary” over the PA system. The boat lists to one side while every passenger aboard leans out over open ocean to try to get a photo. Eventually, mom and I give up our spots to let others see. We shake our heads in awe. She poses on the opposite rail, empty of people, and I shoot off a bunch of pictures. The one I like best I frame and station in the living room. After several years and two moves, I forget the details of the trip. At some point, I slide the picture out of its smart black metal and replace it with one of the kids posing in Halloween costumes.   The truth is, it’s off season. There are no other tourists on the deck. The few who came are inside eating Doritos; the wind is cold and mom and I alone brave it. Even though right out of the docks we had dolphins following the boat’s wake, now all is quiet minus an occasional cormorant overhead. It isn’t until we’re almost back at the harbor, the crew apologetic, naturalist going on and on about breeding habits, that I think to aim my camera at mom, who smiles obligingly, tells me she doesn’t mind about the whales, it was still a thrill just to be on the water.   There is no boat. Mom and I stand on sand and squint in the direction the German man pointed. We can only make out white crests on a choppy sea. Mom pulls her hood on and focuses her lens on hermit crabs in the tidepool. I’ve forgotten my camera in the car. Tomorrow she will fly home across the country and I will see her again once more before the day I arrive at the hospital and kiss her cheek. She’ll leave me a letter that says, It was enough.   Limoncini By Paola Bruni   The small craters of the sun-tipped Villafranca lemon, bitter to the tongue. Perhaps, my grandmother would say, a propagation like the Sicilians themselves— too much salt in the air. The fruit has a pale oval neck, an inconspicuous nipple. To her, it was a stunted variety, as I feared was I. My breasts, she termed limoncini, a pair of petite sour fruits I’d inherited from my father’s side. For hers were classically Primofiore, a strain of lemon excessive in their fleshy countenance. In my adolescence, she took to pinching my nipples between her thumb and forefinger. I implored my mother to intervene. But on the subject of breasts, she spoke only to say, You didn’t want my milk, my infant lips refusing to suckle. When the surgeons took my mother’s left breast, I was eighteen and filled with remorse. Does rejection grow invasive roots? Grandmother developed an attraction for the ample, thick-rind Genoa and Lisbon species. On special occasions, the Limetta was sought, a sweet incestuous marriage of the Eureka lemon and Mexican lime. She served fricassea di vitella, cotolette di maiale fritte, crostata di limone—dishes so rife with lemony hues, every meal lifted to a bright archipelago. We did not understand the lemon’s complex vocabulary, or how deeply its seeds were sown. By the time I left college, Grandmother stopped referring to my breasts as limoncini. Instead, un pecato, a shame. She worried I would not mate, would not propagate. How often I thought of her through my barren, childless years. Grandmother was long gone when Mother’s right breast was trimmed away. She was left no foliage to soak up the warmth of the world, only pale pink branches that spread across her chest. KATHRYN PETRUCCELLI is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated poet with roots in spoken word and a degree in teaching English language learners. Her poetry has appeared in places like the Massachusetts Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, About Place Journal, and Anacapa Review. You can find her prose at places like SweetLit, Switch, Fictive Dream, The Los Angeles Review, and Wrong Turn Lit. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland which she enjoys greatly, besides missing her former job as tour guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum. She teaches online, pay-what-you-can workshops that aim to build community. Come say hello via her website: poetroar.com, or at her Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet. PAOLA BRUNI is originally from San Francisco and now lives in Aptos, California by the sea. She began writing poetry in 2016 after a long marketing career. Pushcart nominated, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, The Birmingham Review, Rattle, Adroit, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest judged by Ellen Bass. Her first book of poetry titled how do you spell the sound of crickets is an epistolary collection written with the late poet, Jory Post, and published by Paper Angel Press. Paola is also co-author of the nonfiction book, Let God Love You Up, published by the Maria Press. Read more at paolabruniwriter.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 15  features Scott Cunningham reading “Hear The Offspring and 311 Cover Each Other’s Hits,” and Sarah Trudgeon reading “Miami Vacation!”   “HEAR THE OFFSPRING AND 311 COVER EACH OTHER’S HITS” By Scott Cunningham -SPIN magazine tweet, July 19, 2018   I can’t help it. I’m always already driving down Military Trail, listening to the Offspring or 311, the CD pulled into its slot like a sunset   or it’s 90 degrees in December and I’m wearing Doc Martins and a flannel, the one speckled yellow and purple, the sight of me leaving: an ornate sunset.   That sound you hear is either a mosquito or a bulldozer tearing down Bo’s U-Pick the Boca Mall, La Vieille Maison—that’s French for, You missed the sunset.   My palm was created to hold a bottle of Zima, the cord of a landline, the wheel of a two-door Honda. Dear October in Mizner Plaza, I miss your sunsets.   I don’t know who tells the tide to obey the sea wall’s edge, what keeps the row of sea grapes from being crushed by the weight of the sunset.   No one wants the last house on the street, the one pushed up against the highway’s retaining wall, a florescent bulb instead of a sunset.   Our house spackles its wounds with water from the canal out back. From my perch on the roof, I watch a sugar fire cook up a brackish sunset.   The mangroves walk north together, their smell overpowering the smoke. Her mouth hits mine, and what is that taste, if not the sunset?   Our diving board is the train bridge that crosses over the Hillsboro canal. We wait for the horn, the light through the pines, then outrace the sunset.   In Florida, breathing means swallowing, as if the sky were being poured. The flood they talk about already happened. Drowning predates the sunset.   Pushed aside like fallen snow, water in the peninsula piles up in pools in ponds, in coolers. It says, Wait. I’m not done yet.   To love this state, you have to divest yourself from tomorrow. Bail out your hope. Slow your heart rate to the sunset’s.   They’ll build strip malls here until the town loses its name then landless, they’ll incorporate the sunset.   I’ll leave enough sweat behind that the fish will call me, Father. My billboard says, Every burial in Florida—an inverted sunset.   I don’t need to hear the Offspring and 311 cover each other’s hits. I witnessed the dawn. I don’t want to see the sunset.   Miami Vacation! By Sarah Trudgeon   I am on the balcony of 275 looking at a flamboyant tree and shadowy early people moving through the halls and windows and the fountain is going below and its fat koi. Every night I dream of our old apartment. Last week I dreamed I saw an owl in a tree in a window and made everybody look, and we got closer and the tree was actually inside, and the owl was actually a baby and I plucked him down. My mom’s beach shorts hanging on a fake Ficus flutter in the breeze. An iguana crashes around in the palm fronds. A house gecko stuck on the wall like a spy starts and stops. 80% of animals are nematodes. Aaron took the baby for a walk. Everyone else is asleep. Yesterday Saul stepped on a bee. Yesterday I smashed my finger in the door jamb now it’s purple and blue and going to fall off. I bought a new water bottle. Sid locked himself in the pool bathroom but Aaron heard him yelling. My mom said the seawater cleaned her rings and I rolled my eyes but now I see my rings are also clean. “Listen to this,” she says and I know it is going to be some tragedy about a neighbor— Died of a Tylenol overdose. Has four months to live. Became an alcoholic after the hurricane. Her husband’s father cut him out of his will. “He’s such a sweet man,” says Aaron. A sweet man. I love that Aaron said that. And the way he said it. An Australian woman and her New Jersey husband call and try to order Cuban sandwiches on the beach but the place only has croissants. They pass a pink vape pen back and forth and mutter about their daughter taking selfies on the sandbar. My toes are a little sunburned. The baby and I go to the Winn Dixie and get everything. Are these other parents better than me? Do I leave my towel here to save this chair? I thought a guy on the beach was muscly but he’s not. I think of so many Fun Things to do with the kids. The vultures soar. I drink my coffee fast. Old Ironsides is a ship made of live oak that couldn’t be blasted by cannons in the war of 1812. Everyone is coughing. We get pizza and the baby chews on a crust. Earlier I said, “Let’s get pizza, the baby can chew on a crust.” A palm warbler and an iguana hang out in the Bermuda grass. Sid keeps making fortune tellers but he has a unique understanding of fortune— You win. You lose. 40 unicorns. NBA. The laundry in the dryer was still wet this morning. I run on the beach where I used to run and dream of a husband and a baby. Somebody finds me. The baby plays with the kitchen utensils. I buy a $48 bottle of wine that I don’t drink. Aaron saves our spot on the beach. The bakery is too busy to even get into. The Seychelles tortoise can live to be 250 years old. The two at the zoo are only 100. The oldest human is 118. Hey, look at the water! Look at the sunrise! I nurse the baby in my wet bathing suit. Last night I dreamed that I drove myself off the map. My mind drifts towards to-do lists, sad little gray clouds. On the plane there is a sea of glowing white cloud cover, meaning the world below is gray. Mosquito bites. Black and blue finger. The kids are awake. But I thought I’d lost the cap to my new water bottle, but minutes before we left, the baby found it. P. SCOTT CUNNINGHAM is the author of Self-Portrait as the “I” in Florida, winner of the 2025 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Major Jackson and forthcoming in 2026 from Autumn House Press. His debut collection, Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), was selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Ya Te Veo was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, POETRY, A Public Space, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Monocle, and The Guardian, among others. Born and raised in South Florida, he is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the founder of the O, Miami Poetry Festival. He lives with his family in Illinois. Learn more at pscottcunningham.com. SARAH TRUDGEON is the author of Dreams of Unhappiness and The Plot Against the Baby. Her poems and other writing have appeared in Bennington Review, Eight Miami Poets, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Paris Review, The TLS, The Yale Review, and more. She is the literary director of The Mastheads and lives in Great Barrington, MA. Learn more at sarahtrudgeon.com. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie.  Episode 14 features James Davis and Jessica Hammack. James reads “Focus on the Family, 1996” which was originally published in The Sewanee Review. Jessica reads “Free Country” which was originally published in The Baltimore Review. Focus on the Family, 1996 By James Davis i. The family was a scatterplot through which I drew a trending line that pointed toward an origin that I called God. But it was not an unambiguous data set. What the hell was a “third cousin”? I’d met one at that year’s reunion. We watched the Olympics and got wet scoring each other’s cannonballs into the Hilton’s peopled pool. I plotted his coordinates beneath a friend from middle school who met me in the bathroom stalls, where we ignored each other’s zits.   ii. The family watched a VHS in which James Dobson rapped with teens. He cracked some jokes. He wore blue jeans and doffed his hat to horniness. His wife and he had intercourse three times a week. [Off-screen groans.] Condoms were ineffective screens. against both AIDS and syphilis. We watched him in the family room, my brother, father, stepmom, me. Beneath us, in the sofa bed, the mattress squashed a fieldmouse, dead among his droppings. The TV shed its blue light on the tomb.   iii. The family joined in silent prayer for the hostages to be released, for the bomb strapped to the gunman’s chest to be a dud, for hands in the air. He’d been a construction worker there and compound-fractured his left wrist. He was seeing a psychiatrist. He didn’t feel provided for.   The family said, tough luck, big guy. You poke the bear, you get the claws. The family wasn’t without cause to want revenge. Neither was I. I’d gotten a B on my algebra test. Of all of us, I hated best.   iv. The family voted for Bob Dole. We saw in him a gravitas; in the incumbent, a literal ass. We tsktsked every exit poll. I swallowed Gardetto’s pieces whole to punish my esophagus. It wouldn’t be my only loss that year, but it would be the rule: Democracy won’t do God’s plan. Alone, I graphed parabolas and found their curvature consoling. They spent half of forever falling into the lowest point there was until forever started up again.   Free Country By Jessica Hammack     My childhood wasn’t so bad. I had a stack   of Noxzema pads, a trundle bed. I had ketchup sandwiches, and a yard,   a ditch where onions grew, fat and purple. Back then my teachers said war was good for the economy, and instead of I don’t care     my friends and I would say Free country, as if that gave us permission to do anything we wanted, like hock loogies out the bus window, or say that we, too, could become President someday, despite all evidence to the contrary. To me, the sweater of America   had only just begun unraveling: imagine,   I had never seen a murder on a telephone.   I hadn’t even heard of student loans, or proxy wars, or mortgages gone underwater. I used to draw the ocean full of smiling fish.   I had a crush on Officer Kip, the DARE cop,     who, the first week of class, set out a box that said, in navy Sharpie, Tell Me Everything. From my assigned seat, I wrote what I was told. I used to think that growing up meant being free. That I could choose my life. I really thought that they would ask, and I could just say no. JAMES DAVIS is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poetry has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and anthologized in two installments of Best New Poets (2011 and 2019). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Five Points, Literary Matters, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, and other notable venues. Originally from Colorado Springs, he lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches English at the University of North Texas. Learn more at www.jamesdavispoet.com. JESSICA HAMMACK is from Morgantown, West Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, The Baltimore Review, Poet Lore, and other journals. She holds a BA in English literature from Hiram College, an MFA from the University of Florida, and an MLIS from the University of Maryland. She works as the head of research and instruction at the Beneficial-Hodson Library in Frederick, Maryland.  This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch with us at: [email protected]