Hi, friends, I've got some news for you. I've got two books coming out in early 2025.

44 poems on being with each other is a poetry-unbound collection with 44 poems and 44 essays.

There's poems from Jericho Brown and Mary Oliver and Lucille Clifton in there.

And I have a collection of my own poems coming out too. It's called Kitchen Hymns.

You can pre-order these wherever you get your books, online bookshops, or even better, your local bookshop.

There's more info at poetry unbound.org.

Thanks, friends.

My name is Podrig Otuma, and I, like many, many people, spent an enormous amount of my childhood

fantasizing and dreaming about leaving my childhood, but leaving home, about growing off, about being

different. One of the things that I didn't understand then is that you take your childhood

with you, spend the rest of your life thinking about your childhood. It's always there.

Fortunately, we have poetry as a vehicle where you can examine time, examine yourself,

and you can also examine the other people who were present in your childhood.

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden.

Sundays too, my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue, black, cold,

then with cracked hands that ached from labour in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering,

breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house, speaking indifferently to him who had driven out the cold,

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know?

What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices? I'm I'm I'm

The This poem by Robert Hayden, I think might be one of the finest poems I've ever read,

...