Poetry Unbound

“How could there be a war in this city?” is the plaintive question that starts Oksana Makysymchuk’s “Arguments for Peace”. Like ours, the world of her poem holds both the “goodness of the universe” and “a foreign leader / warning of invasion”. She offers no pat answers for what to do in the face of conflict — just a dizzying sense of disbelief and the deep desire to hold tight to the people and life around us.  
We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and translator. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.
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In Armen Davoudian’s casually intimate poem “Coming Out of the Shower”,  mother and son perform their morning routines in the small, shared space of their household’s only bathroom. She chats and puts on her makeup, while he showers and uses her shampoo and robe — oh what rhythm, affection, and ease are to be seen in this dance they both know so well.  
We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  
Armen Davoudian has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry Magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and currently lives in California.
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Some religions and some people have very specific ideas about “grace”, and that includes poet Orlando Ricardo Menes. In the carefully constructed “Grace”, he manages to both demystify and remystify what grace is, leaving us with the possibility that at any moment or no moment it could pour down and quench us all. Intrigued? Confused? Give this episode a listen.  
We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  
Orlando Ricardo Menes teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor of English. He is also the author of several other works of poetry, including Memoria, Fetish, and Heresies. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.
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In fewer than two dozen lines, Cyrus Cassells’s poem “Jasmine” offers readers a multisensory, cinematic immersion into late spring life in Rome. Not only is the “sweet, steady broadcast” of jasmine ever-present amid “the joyous braiding of sun and rain”, but there’s also Daria, a “crone-glorious” neighbor, with a story about her romance with the gallant Galliano. It’s la dolce vita, without overindulgence or artifice. 
We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  
Cyrus Cassells, former poet laureate of Texas, is the author of 11 books of poetry, including Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (2024), The World That the Shooter Left Us (2022), and More Than Watchmen at Daybreak (2020). Cassells’s honors include the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, a National Poetry Series selection, two NEA grants, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.
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W.S. Merwin’s “For The Anniversary of My Death” is a slim, precise poem — just 13 lines made up of 84 words — about the very weightiest of subjects, one’s future death. With it, Merwin has crafted an elegant vessel, a small and sturdy container to hold some of life’s big questions, uncertainties, and feelings. Are you ready to gaze at it, grasp it, sit with it? And as you contemplate death, he gently reminds, remain here — where there’s rain, birdsong, and life right in front of you.  
W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and attended Princeton University on a scholarship. He worked as a tutor and freelance translator before publishing his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus (1952), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, selected by W.H. Auden. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice — for The Carrier of Ladders (1971)  and for The Shadow of Sirius (2008). In 2005, he won the National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems. Merwin also served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and two terms as the U.S. poet laureate, among numerous other awards and honors. He died in 2019 at his home on the island of Maui, Hawaii, at the age of 91.  
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