Polly Brown / Poet

Tag: books

  • Gifts from Non-Poets

    Here’s a piece of luck no poet should ever take for granted: the gift of knowing ordinary civilians—non-poets—who’ve somehow learned to welcome poems into their lives. Welcoming a poem, for me, means sitting with it—or walking around with it—and reading it more than once, maybe including out loud. Ultimately, though, I give credit to anyone…

  • Lucky

    Lucky

    I’m still thinking about courage. Given when and how and where we are now, all of us, it’s not surprising. Some of the bravest people I’ve known have been eleven-year-olds. (Or ten, or twelve.) In 2001, the day after 9/11, I sat with a group of kids shaken but still thinking together: trying to come…

  • Poems and a Few Green Beans

    February 2, 2026 I’ve been thinking about resettling, about claiming or being claimed by a place, about what’s hard in that, and what can be good. Not everyone gets to choose where they live, and some individual choices are denied. So often, there’s no way of going back. And sometimes it looks or feels like…