Three Poets on Hurricanes, History & the Converse MFA

When her Florida apartment is damaged by the ferocity of Hurricane Irma, Denise Duhamel turns to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem “Terza Irma.” Throughout her new poetry collection, Second Story: Poems, she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, hyper aware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, she bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell. In formal and nontraditional poems, Ashley M. Jones calls for long-overdue reparations to the Black descendants of enslaved people in the United States. In Reparations Now!, she takes on the worst of today – state-sanctioned violence, pandemic-induced crises, and white silence – all while uplifting Black joy. In In All These Hungers: Poems, Rick Mulkey turns on his hungers, turns Rimbaud into something American, small town scrappy, transparent and musky: these poems land on the tongue and in the brain and center on the stomach. Whisky, beans, peppered pork belly bacon, lemonade, unclean scrambled eggs, very cold sweet tea, onions, beets, tomatoes, wine – these Rabelaisian poems have a nose for the ground that smells “like dusty clocks.”

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