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Dear friends,
I was in India for a month to see my parents and extended family for the first time since I moved to the West three and a half years ago. It was quite an experience adjusting to the heat, noise, and all the people everywhere. I felt like a posh queen too pristine for everything around her even though it was my day to day reality for over two decades not too long ago. I felt deeply lucky, and sad for everyone’s struggles. It wasn’t a new feeling, but certainly one that had been dormant for quite some time. Spending time with my sister & meditating with her turned out to be the highlight of the trip. She is an excellent yoga teacher & I’ve convinced her to give free classes to our readers. Expect more info about that soon.
Being away from Shannan & Ana was not fun in the least, so coming back has been most wonderful. The silence here in our little corner of Caledon after a month of everything everywhere at once is a welcome change. It’s also nice to have a more predictable schedule and while I’m still working on all things poetry it’s nice to not have to do them at 3am.
On that note, my days have mostly been occupied with going back & forth with poets & volunteers vis-a-vis audio recordings and I’m super proud to report 635 of 1137 poems we’ve ever published already have a recording attached to it, live on our site. 333 of those have been done by our wonderful readers, and the rest by the poets themselves. The ones still left are more or less equally divided between poets and volunteers and should be live in a week or two. I’m working on creating some cool playlists for y’all & maybe an ONLY POEMS podcast of sorts with no witty banter, only, well...poems. All ideas are welcome!
Through this project, more than any other, ONLY POEMS has felt like a baby raised by the whole village, with the village being the world since the voices (both the poets’ and the readers’) are so global! We are so grateful and so proud.
As ever, thank you for being here, for reading, for trusting us with the deepest bits of your soul.
All good things,
Karan
PS: We are open for free submissions for Poem of the Month til October 7th midnight. The theme is GHOSTS. → SUBMIT HERE
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Poet of the Week
Hera Naguib
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Hera Naguib is a Pakistani writer and educator. She is the author of Rupture Anthem (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026). Winner of the John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award and the 2022 Quarterly West Poetry Prize, Naguib's work has been published in The Believer, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, New England Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of the VIDA Residency Fellowship, Naguib’s work has received support from Art Omi, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, GASHER Press, and the Writers Room of Boston. She lives between Lahore, Pakistan and Boston, Massachusetts. |
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from The Expulsion
What happens when we snipe truth, its hair-narrow bridge?
What happens when we spill fictions?
Belonging, once terra firma, crumbles to smoke.
Mongrel, I huddle on rooftops, dog the city’s last engine
that drones home.
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A Blazing Violence that Had to Speak
On power, place & faith in rupture anthem
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The act of writing poetry is an act of awakening. Poetry works the slumbering conscience. It demands one to witness, to give voice, in the most intimate and immediate sense, to the erased or that which has not yet been named.
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