Dear friends,
​
I write to you with a lot of excitement today. First and foremost, our featured poet this week is the magnificent Victoria Chang! Victoria was a Poet of the Hour at our booth at the Baltimore AWP and it was an insanely busy hour with people lined up the whole time to get their books signed by her. I myself was star-struck sitting next to her. Interviewing her was a dream! And what magnificent answers too. I can’t wait for you to read Victoria’s poems & our conversation.

Additionally, I’ve been planning some website changes for months, hoping to elevate the reading experience for y’all and was finally able to execute a few of them. It only took a hundred hours and a large part of my sanity, but now you can:

1. Listen to some of my favorite classical music pieces as you read through our magazine. Satie & Chopin & Rachmaninoff & Beethoven & Schubert. If you have suggestions of sad & soothing piano pieces that are in the public domain, we’d love to include them.
2. Share poems to social media directly from our site. You’d notice “Share This Poem” cards below each poem. Click them!
3. You can also select/highlight excerpts from a poem, interview, & blog post and share them directly on whatever social media platforms you wish. OR email them to your friends & lovers.
4. Since we have readers of all ages and throughout the world, we also now have a feature where if you hover over any uncommon word, you’ll see its pronunciation, etymology, and meaning.
5. Finally, our website is now far more accessible than before. We’ve improved screen-reader support, contrast, and navigation, and we’ll keep working at it.

We hope all of this will be helpful in making your reading experience seamless & richer. We care immensely about poetry, and are constantly thinking of improving the experience you have at ONLY POEMS. If you have any ideas or suggestions, I heartily welcome them. We’d love to keep making poetry more fun & accessible & beautiful & engaging to encounter.

Yours,

​Karan​

POET OF THE WEEK Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang's book of poems, Tree of Knowledge was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. in July 2026. Her most recent book of poems, With My Back to the World, received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has written several children's books as well, such as Eureka. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

from Spring

On some
days, when I am too heavy with joy, I divide
myself into cubes and triangles so that I can
once again be faceted. What to do with my
dead mother's proverbs, my dead father's
unlived years.

I Get Down on My Knees in the Face of Language

"I understand that we all want our poems to be read by someone, but sometimes our level of ambition might need to be recalibrated for mental health… We're not put on this world as poets to be famous and/or to be admired or to last. We're here to experience the joys of making art and exchanging art and ideas with other people who are alive at the same time as us."

CLOSING NEXT MONTH

$2000 Bob Hicok Fellowship for All Poets, Everywhere