Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).

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Read: "Practice Elegy" at Copper Nickel

Purchase: The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021)

Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collections The Wolf (BOA Editions, forthcoming fall 2027); The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021); The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and No Silence in the Fields, a chapbook from Blue Hour Press. Her poetry has recently appeared at Poetry Magazine, The Believer, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Rachel's essays, criticism, and other articles have appeared, or will soon, at The Millions, The Poetry Foundation, LitHub, and numerous other outlets.

Reading Recommendations:

"Having it out with Melancholy" by Jane Kenyon

Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Dir. Céline Sciamma (film)

Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria

This is How You Lose the Time Warby Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Circe by Madeline Miller

Galatea by Madeline Miller

[Eugenio] Montale in English

Adrienne Rich

Anne Sexton

Virginia Woolf

Anaïs Nin

Sylvia Plath

Today's episode of Of Poetry is hosted by Amorak Huey (uh-MOR-ack), the author of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021).
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Purchase: Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025)

Read: "Larks" at Poetry Daily

Han VanderHartis a queer writer living in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. Their second poetry collection, Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025), was selected by Chanda Feldman as winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Han is also the author of the chapbook Hawk & Moon (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has essays and poetry published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and, alongside Amorak Huey, co-edits the poetry press River River Books.

Amorak Huey (uh-MOR-ack) is the author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2024) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals.

Reading Recommendations:

The Dream of Reason by Jenny George

Robert Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry

James Longenbach, The Lyric Now

The Poet in the World by Denise Levertov

Annie Lauterbach

"Bewilderment" (essay) by Fanny Howe

Gwendolyn Brooks

Marianne Moore

Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).

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Read: "The Difference Between a Dog and a Biscuit Tin" (Poetry Magazine)

Purchase: Kin by Karl Knights (Winner of the New Poets Prize, 2022)

Karl Knights’s poems, critical essays, and journalism have appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Dark Horse, and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, Kin, (2022) was published by The Poetry Business. Knights is a Zoeglossia fellow and won a 2021 New Poets Prize. He lives in Suffolk, England.

Recommended Reading

Brian Patten

Tilling the Hard Soil: Poetry, Prose and Art by South African Writers with Disabilities, ed. Kobus Moolman (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: 2010)

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, eds. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black & Michael Northen (Cinco Puntos Press: 2011)

QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, ed. Raymond Luczak (Squares & Rebels: 2015)

Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, eds. Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka & Daniel Sluman (Nine Arches Press: 2017)

Imaginary Safe House, eds. Shane Neilson, Roxanna Bennett & Ally Fleming (Frog Hollow Press: 2019)