“Poetry for the People”: Richard Blanco, Gianna Russo & Olive Senior

Gianna Russo is the author of the poetry collections Moonflower and One House Down, and the chapbooks The Companion of Joy and In Late Day Sun, with photographer Lori Ballard. Her poetry has appeared in Tampa Review, Ekphrasis, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Florida Humanities Council Forum, and others. Her creative nonfiction essays have appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, and she also contributed a chapter to the collaborative novel 15 Views of Tampa Bay. All I See Is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic (Madville Publishing), a dialogue between Russo’s poems and the images of photographer Jenny Carey, documents each day of the last quarter of 2020. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, Russo wrote 90 poems focusing on the small, meaningful moments of everyday life. Stunning photographs of the natural world and intimate environments enrich and further open the text. Together, they refract and reflect our collective experience through a personal lens. All I See Is Your Glinting champions the value of nature, friendship, family, and love in coping with individual and universal suffering and grief.

Nicole Tallman is a ghostwriter and poet. Her professional writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Business Journal, and on Al Jazeera, and her poetry is featured or forthcoming in the Train River COVID-19 Anthology, The Blue Mountain Review, Wrongdoing Magazine, and others. She also serves as the poetry ambassador for Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava; is the associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal; and the editor of Stay Golden, a Golden Girls-inspired special zine. Her collection Something Kindred (The Southern Collective Experience Press) inspired Richard Blanco, 2013 presidential inaugural poet, to note that “Through the spare beauty of haiku and fineness of belles-lettres, Nicole Tallman pens an evocative and stirring account of grieving that echoes with ache in our hearts, but also soothes us with the understanding that love is immortal despite our losses.”

Olive Senior, poet laureate of Jamaica 2021–24, is the author of 20 books, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s literature, and other published work. She has received many awards, and her work has been adapted for radio and stage, translated into many languages, and taught internationally. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems (Carcanet Press Ltd.) brings together Senior’s first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. She has long been recognized as a skillful and evocative storyteller, but this book shows the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior’s poems are delicate, formally playful, and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world, or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems’ brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics, and culture in original and sensuous ways.

Richard Blanco, named Miami-Dade County’s very first poet laureate earlier this year, was selected by President Barack Obama as the country’s fifth inaugural presidential poet and is the author of two memoirs and four poetry collections. He is also a professor at Florida International University and a public speaker. In How to Love a Country: Poems (Beacon Press), Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved social and political matters that affect us all. The poems form a mosaic of varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. These poems interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, note our flaws, celebrate our ideals and hold on to our hopes. America, they suggest, could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love.