Unterberg Poetry Center of The 92nd Street Y, New York

09/07/2023

We're back! Happy September to all. Tomorrow, we start our season off with something really special.

ANNOUNCING: Daughters of Latin America: An Anthology Reading
Hosted by Rosie Perez
With Carmen Boullosa, Giannina Braschi, Sonia Guiñansaca, Sandra Guzmán, Jamaica Kincaid, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Yvette Modestin, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Esmeralda Santiago, Elisabet Velasquez and more.

We're in-person and online. TICKETS:

Online and in-person. Rosie Perez hosts a historic, multilingual gathering of major and emerging Caribbean and Latine writers from the new anthology Daughters of Latin America.

06/16/2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/books/review/lorrie-moore-i-am-homeless-if-this-is-not-my-home.html

THIS TUESDAY, June 20--Lorrie Moore reads from I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME. In-person and online: https://www.92ny.org/event/lorrie-moore

Online and in-person. Lorrie Moore’s new novel is I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

05/18/2023

New poems out by the winners of the 2023 Discovery Poetry Contest, up in Literary Hub!

For over 60 years 92NY’s Discovery Contest has launched the careers of major poets like John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Mark Strand, Larry Levis, Mary Jo Bang, Solmaz Sharif and Diana Khoi Nguyen, t…

05/15/2023

he got lost humming & then went over his body
by jj pena, 2023 Discovery Poetry Contest Winner

when we were still kids, my brother jose found an abandoned baby bird & we tried to make it a nest in our backyard. he made me find the materials—twigs & rocks & earth—while he got lost humming to it, pressed the baby bird tight to his chest, comforting it with his palm’s heat. he didn’t let me hold the baby bird because i didn’t know how to be careful. but i could pet it—& the baby bird was soft, its feathers felt like touching warm summer grass. after looking at my sad nest, jose told me we needed to convince our dad to let the baby bird sleep inside, in a real bed. i agreed & we plotted: plotted to crash into our dad as soon as he got home from work, beg & promise we’d take care of it, that if he let us keep the baby bird, it would make up for him taking our dog far out into the desert & leaving it out there, all alone. we plotted until our sister let the boys from next door into our backyard, who wanted to play with us, who got bummed when we told them no, who crowded my brother when they saw the baby bird, let us see! let us see! they pat the baby bird’s head rough & asked, why is it not flying? is it broken? i shrugged & jose didn’t say anything. he didn’t like talking a lot around them because they made fun of the way he spoke. sometimes jose had a hard time with his r’s & s’s, he was born like that, tongue-tied. birds are supposed to fly, the taller one said. you just have to make it. look! he snatched the baby bird out of jose’s hand & cannoned it into the air—the baby bird went high, high, high, disappeared over our backyard wall, falling somewhere into the desert nothingness behind our house. we listened & heard nada—not a small chirp, not even a flutter—& i think my brother went above his body then: his fists wouldn’t stop swinging, not even when both of the boys’ noses erupted in red springs, not even when he knuckled craters into the walls of our room, & not even the next day, when we broke into their house & thrashed about, destroying anything we thought they loved. ’cause that’s the only way we know how to get revenge, by hurting.

http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/543-jj-pena-he-got-lost-humming.html

05/14/2023

Self-Portrait as the Crab Nebula
by Jenna Lanzaro, 2023 Discovery Poetry Contest Winner

https://nightheronbarks.com/spring-2022/jenna-lanzaro/

05/13/2023

Pumpkin Seeds
by Lucas Jorgensen, 2023 Discovery Poetry Contest Winner

Online, I see a story about a little boy who grew
pumpkins in his bathroom sink—his teeth
in the picture as small & white as tic tacs. A friend
tells me she misses innocence. & I miss
it too. I miss smiles like the boy’s. Smiles that say
tomorrow is another pear to juice.
At some point, I passed through a filter. No matter
how wide I open the aperture of my eyes, new pictures
develop grey. I never grew anything myself,
but my mother once dressed me as a jack-o’-lantern
& carried me from house to house on Halloween.
The boy tried to show his mother the first sprout—
small & waxen when it rose from the sink. I don’t
remember being a pumpkin, but I have pictures,
& pictures remember the light. As a child,
every stomachache was the worst pain I’d ever felt,
then I forgot it. I haven’t felt the worst pain
I’ll feel yet. The worst things are unavoidable.
My mother & father will die. My friends. Me.
When the flow of water stopped, then reversed,
crept up & over the porcelain brim, the boy’s mother
found his seedlings, their green grown deep
into the drain. The boy & I looked like them
until we breached the loam. When I stopped
growing, I collapsed under my own weight.

https://fuguejournal.com/pumpkin-seeds

Pumpkin SeedsLucas Jorgensen Pumpkin SeedsOnline, I see a story about a little boy who grew pumpkins in his bathroom sink—his teethin the picture as small & white as tic tacs. A friend tells me she misses innocence. & I miss it too. I miss smiles like the boy’s. Smiles that say tomorrow is anoth...

05/12/2023

Questions for the Outward Curve of My Stomach, Where I Sometimes Rest My Hand and Pretend to be Pregnant
by Saba Keramati, 2023 Discovery Poetry Contest Winner

What have I inherited?

Is it salt?

Why does it sit so heavy in my stomach?

Aunties: why are our words for stomach and soul the same?

I am a woman: I was born with all my future children inside of me.

Is there a DNA test for this?

For salt?

Where does it all go, if I don’t have a daughter?

Will it be the salt people sprinkle on their plums?

A lavender scrub to massage a woman’s legs?

Returned to the earth, to feed a small cucumber garden?

Whose turn will it be to hold these glassy splinters?

Who can I assure the hurt will pass?

Whose hand to hold?

Whose belly to clutch when the jagged edges cut deep inside?

My aunties once scrubbed a chair for two hours after I bled on it.

https://barrenmagazine.com/questions-for-the-outward-curve-of-my-stomach/

05/11/2023

TONIGHT! Catherine Lacey (BIOGRAPHY OF X) and Miriam Toews (WOMEN TALKING; FIGHT NIGHT) read together! Join us for histories, for bad women making good points (and bad points?), for storytelling, for lies and truth-finding.

In person and online, 7:30p US Eastern: https://www.92ny.org/event/catherine-lacey-and-miriam-toews

Online and in-person. Novelist Catherine Lacey now publishes Biography of X. Miriam Toews is now the author of Fight Night.

05/03/2023

TOMORROW: Join Tony Award-winning playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes and New York State Poet Willie Perdomo for a very special reading of new work. Tickets are nearly sold out, so get yours now!

In-person and online: https://www.92ny.org/event/quiara-alegria-hudes-and-willie-perdomo

Online and in-person. Quiara Alegría Hudes’s new play is My Broken Language. Willie Perdomo’s books include Smoking Lovely: The Remix and The Crazy Bunch.

04/25/2023

you carry the love from others in your hair
by jj peña, 2023 DISCOVERY CONTEST WINNER

most stories about my tía nieves are about her birth: how she was pushed out
covered in snow, winter my grandma didn’t want near. that’s why my grandma
didn’t press my tía close to her ribcage—let their geographies crust over each
other—that’s why my tía was raised by another woman, by another family,
hundreds & hundreds of soundtracks away, on uncombed land, where my tía
would stomp, stumble, storm, where she’d fall down dripping trees, lay as a
dropped peach, twirl hair strands into whirlpools, wonder if you’re supposed
to find your mother in your hair. what i think my tía believes: you carry the
love from others in your hair. the first time i met her, her fingers grazed
through my scalp, & she told me in spanish, your head’s not hungry at all. look
at all you got inside. an idea i loved to wonder about, but could never prove, not
even when my hair would forest over my ears, root. but i would like for my
tia’s theory to be true, so that you weren’t alone when you killed yourself, so
that when you put a bag over your head & your breathing fragiled, you could
have heard us as the world slipped away: our love swimming through your
curls, at first soft, quiet, & then rowing into a loud, thundering, lullabying hum.

https://massreview.org/sites/default/files/79_62.2Pen%CC%83a.pdf

Don't miss the Discovery Contest Winners' reading on Mon, May 15: https://www.92ny.org/event/discovery-poetry-contest We're really excited! Free, but RSVPs required!

04/24/2023

Incredible Truths
by Jenna Lanzaro, 2023 DISCOVERY CONTEST WINNER

Two folks at a table exchange incredible truths.
The Mariana Trench is 36,000 feet deep,
1,000 feet more than the cruising altitude of a plane.
When you are on a plane, there is a farther far than the surface of the Earth.
When you are on Earth, there is a farther far than the sky.
There is always a farther far,
if you believe the universe is infinite, but also expanding. A far
that is and isn’t a fixed place. The girl says, All contradictions are true,
while looking for proof in the sky.
Her hair resembles something accustomed to deep
seas, long and breathless in alien air. The boy says Exponential growth. Points to a plane.
Today, Jeff Bezos left Earth.
They say he’ll be a trillionaire. He bites a plain
croissant. The far of that, from us: people don’t get how far
one billion is on a scale, a magnitude as swollen as the Earth.
She is scared of exponential growth. Also paper-cuts, telling the truth,
and that this meal will end. The girl sips deeply.
The boys looks at the sky
where the girl looked before. He is patient, but counting; he looks at the sky
not her, or the words as irrefutable as what they’ve put on the plain
surface of the table at the café. Once (still) he was deep
in her. The Mariana Trench, she says, is far
enough that the truth of what is there is not a truth
we know, us of the surface of the Earth.
But there is a truth, and the trench is Earth
after all, and (she doesn’t say this out loud) you have always been, for me, like a sky,
a not-place place, a largeness like the gullet of a lanternfish. Truth,
chanted, becomes a sound. She does not say out loud, I flew on a plane
and you didn’t know. I was far
and you didn’t know. I read a book about lakes in the deep,
brine pools on the seafloor, I met deep
and insignificant people (for them you are words), I went from one part of Earth
to another part of Earth so far
from this table, I was in the sky
and you didn’t know, I looked in your direction from a plane,
I thought: that we were, and that we are not—

https://www.rattle.com/incredible-truths-by-jenna-lanzaro/

JOIN US on MON MAY 15 for a FREE READING by our Discovery Contest Winners. In-person and online: https://www.92ny.org/event/discovery-poetry-contest

Two folks at a table exchange incredible truths.

04/23/2023

Self-Portrait as a Bowl of Persimmons
by Saba Keramati, 2023 DISCOVERY CONTEST WINNER

It is true: all words are invented. I have names in three languages. What’s the word for this?

*

My mother brings home persimmons from the market. She names them. Washes them gently, so as not
to bruise.

My father opens the persimmons. He names them. Reveals how they are somehow darker on the inside
than the out.

*

I eat persimmons, ruminating on poetry. Turning the words of it over in my mouth with each chew.
Each bite a new language. With the taste comes the remembering. So much what are you. There are
two kinds of persimmons. In English, they are the same.

I define myself: a hybrid child, heart-shaped and ready. I celebrate the sweet flesh of myself. Call myself.
Name myself. Create a fortune of myself. I am looking for words, but why?

The persimmons are right there.

https://haydensferryreview.com/selfportrait-as-a-bowl-of-persimmons-saba-keramati

Join us Monday, May 15, for the FREE winner's reading, in-person and online! https://www.92ny.org/event/discovery-poetry-contest

I eat persimmons, ruminating on poetry. Turning the words of it over in my mouth with each chew.Each bite a new language. With the taste comes the remembering. So much what are you. There aretwo kinds of persimmons. In English, they are the same.

04/22/2023

Non-cento from the Bureau of the Library of Alexandria
By Lucas Jorgensen, 2023 DISCOVERY CONTEST WINNER

Brigit Pegeen Kelly said it burned. Hera Lindsay Bird said it burned in alphabetical order. There’s nothing left about it to say. To say, “there’s nothing left about it to say” is awfully similar to what Alberto Ríos said about the Sonoran Desert and its fires—mainly, actually, that there was only one thing left to say. Then, he said it. The way it took a thousand years and one Jack Gilbert to say we’ve forgotten the beauty in Icarian flight. And he’s right. But I’d also say, even more beautiful is the moment before Icarus flies. When he sees both outcomes reflected on the ocean in front of him and still decides there’s nothing left to lose. And sure, were Elizabeth Bishop there, with her keen clairvoyant eye, she would say the trail of wax he lost behind his wings looked exactly like disaster bobbing on the waves. Perhaps we should reframe. Mary Ruefle says The Odyssey was probably sung by sirens because none of us can turn away from the tragedy of our own lives. And the logical conclusion of this history arrives when Ocean Vuong borrows Telemachus’s clothing, finds his father with a bullet in his back, washed in by a foaming red tide. His teacher, Sharon Olds, does a similar trick—when she makes her father say “I love you” from the afterlife. We get to do this—dilute the River Styxes of the real world under the peat bogs of the mind. Like, I could tell you it didn’t matter that the Library burned—that it’s all bubblegum and cherry pie to say it stopped us from developing steam engines or penicillin in a pre-American century. But after I said that, I could take it back, like Ada Limón when American Pharaoh unstrung the gray from her sky. I have to remind myself at times of Terrance Hayes’s advice, that what it is isn’t always what it looks like. The Library burned, yes. But no one ever talks about the scribe who put it out.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158376/non-cento-from-the-bureau-of-the-library-of-alexandria

Join us for the FREE Discovery Poetry Contest Winners' Reading May 15: https://www.92ny.org/event/discovery-poetry-contest

Brigit Pegeen Kelly said it burned. Hera Lindsay Bird said it burned

04/20/2023

ANNOUNCING THE 2023 DISCOVERY CONTEST WINNERS: Lucas Jorgensen, Saba Keramati, Jenna Lanzaro and JJ Peña! Runners up are Austin Araujo, Ariana Benson, David Gorin and Alison Zheng.

So excited to share this news, and thank you to everyone who applied!

Please join us for the free reading on Monday, May 15, in-person and online! https://www.92ny.org/event/discovery-poetry-contest

Online and in-person. 92NY’s Discovery Poetry Contest recognizes the work of poets who have not yet published a book.

04/10/2023

As from a Quiver of Arrows
By Carl Phillips

What do we do with the body, do we
burn it, do we set it in dirt or in
stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey,
oil, and then gauze and tip it onto
and trust it to a raft and to water?

What will happen to the memory of his
body, if one of us doesn't hurry now
and write it down fast? Will it be
salt or late light that it melts like?
Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap

to a pen elsewhere —how are we to
regard his effects, do we throw them
or use them away, do we say they are
relics and so treat them like relics?
Does his soiled linen count? If so,

would we be wrong then, to wash it?
There are no instructions whether it
should go to where are those with no
linen, or whether by night we should
memorially wear it ourselves, by day

reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty.
Here, on the floor behind his bed is
a bent photo—why? Were the two of
them lovers? Does it mean, where we
found it, that he forgot it or lost it

or intended a safekeeping? Should we
attempt to make contact? What if this
other man too is dead? Or alive, but
doesn't want to remember, is human?
Is it okay to be human, and fall away

from oblation and memory, if we forget,
and can't sometimes help it and sometimes
it is all that we want? How long, in
dawns or new c***s, does that take?
What if it is rest and nothing else that

we want? Is it a findable thing, small?
In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe,
a country? Will a guide be required who
will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we
swim? What will I do now, with my hands?

Phillips returns to the Y TONIGHT with Ama Codjoe, who makes her 92NY debut. Don't miss it--in-person or online:

04/07/2023

Wallace Stevens Comes Back to Read His Poems at the 92nd Street Y
By Mark Strand

It was a willfulness, an exertion, which verged
At once on fluency, that I should appear, as I did
Today, out of light-blue air, in a dark-blue suit.

In the time that I have been gone, I never outgrew
The sensation of being, nor for a moment forgot
Which world was mine. I clung to the merest whispers,

The faintest echoes that rose from below. For years,
I lay on a down-filled sofa, alone with my passions.
Bright refrains of endless azure circled

The hours, and filled me with pleasure, but the poems
I wrote were dulled by the sort of calm one feels
In the downward drift of sleep. They never became

The relics of light I wished them to be. In the days
When it could be said I was one of you, I loved
The beyond as somebody only can who is bound

By the earth. All that I wrote was a hymn to desire,
To the semblances and stages of bliss. My poems
Bore only a passing likeness to the life

Of which they were the miraculous part. But when
I was borne among the erasures of heaven I began
To believe that whatever was distant or puzzling could never

Be made too obvious. Of course I was wrong.
I’d allowed myself to be swayed by a vision of plainness
That would have all things turn into one idea.

So much for the past. May the worst of it fall by the wayside
Tonight. May other more intricate powers convene.
May the words that I speak be the ones you hear.

This poem was rediscovered in our files--read more at New Yorker : https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/lost-and-found-a-recently-resurfaced-poem-by-the-late-mark-strand

“Wallace Stevens Comes Back to Read His Poems at the 92nd Street Y,” which The New Yorker purchased in 1994, is published for the first time in the magazine’s Anniversary Issue.

04/06/2023

The cup of Eliyahu
By Marge Piercy

In life you had a temper.
Your sarcasm was a whetted knife.
Sometimes you shuddered with fear
but you made yourself act no matter
how few stood with you.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.

Now you return to us
in rough times, out of smoke
and dust that swirls blinding us.
You come in vision, you come
in lightning on blackness.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.

In every generation you return
speaking what few want to hear
words that burn us, that cut
us loose so we rise and go again
over the sharp rocks upward.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.

You come as a wild man,
as a homeless sidewalk orator,
you come as a woman taking the bima,
you come in prayer and song,
you come in a fierce rant.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that she may come in.

Prophecy is not a gift, but
sometimes a curse, Jonah
refusing. It is dangerous
to be right, to be righteous.
To stand against the wall of might.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.

There are moments for each
of us when you summon, when
you call the whirlwind, when you
shake us like a rattle: then we
too must become you and rise.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that we may come in.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57594/the-cup-of-eliyahu

In life you had a temper.

04/05/2023

The Trans Haggadah Companion
By Bev Yockelson

On this night
I remember Nachshon
who was not Moses who
walked into the Red Sea
and called for God
to meet him there
On this night
I am only a body and you
are only a body
On this night
nothing is hidden
only the afikomen
On this night
God was here and I
I knew it

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/148990/the-trans-haggadah-companion

On this night

04/01/2023

Happy ! Join us April 10 for a reading by powerhouses Ama Codjoe and Carl Phillips, in celebration of their new books, BLUEST N**E and AND THEN THE WAR.

In-person (in our renovated hall!) and online: https://bit.ly/3niNxvM

03/29/2023

Of That City, the Heart
by Carl Phillips

You lived here once. City—remember?—
of formerly your own, of the forever beloved,
of the dead,

for some part of you, this part,
is dead, you have said so, and it is fitting:
a city of monuments, monuments to what is

gone, leaving us with our human need always
to impose on memory a body language, some
shape that holds.

I can picture you walking
this canal, this park, this predictably steep
gorge through which predictably runs a river,

in which river, earlier today, I saw stranded
a bent hubcap, spent condoms, a cup by
someone crushed, said enough to, tossed …

City in which—what happened? or did not
happen? what chance (of limbs, of spoils)
escaped you?

And yet … I have sometimes
imagined you nowhere happier than here, in
that time before me.

I can even, from what
little you have told me, imagine your first
coming here, trouble ahead but still far,

you innocent—of disappointment, still
clean. In those historical years preceding
the sufferings

of Christ, there were cities
whose precincts no one could enter unclean,
be their stains those of murder, defilement

of the wrong body, or at what was holy some
outrage. There were rituals for cleaning;
behind them, unshakeable laws, or—

they seemed so … But this city is not
ancient. And it is late inside a century
in which clean and unclean,

less and less,
figure. At this hour of sun, in clubs of
light, in broad beams failing, I do not

stop it: I love you. Let us finally, undaunted,
slow, with the slowness that a
jaded ease engenders, together

step into
—this hour, this sun: city of trumpets,
noteless now; of tracks whose end is here.

Join us April 10 to see CARL PHILLIPS and AMA CODJOE on stage together! In-person and online. Get your ticket now: https://www.92ny.org/event/ama-codjoe-and-carl-phillips

Online and in-person. Join us for readings by Ama Codjoe and Carl Phillips, two powerfully original voices in American poetry as they read from their new books.

01/16/2023

LAST CHANCE: The 2023 Discovery Poetry Contest deadline is today, Monday, 1/16.

For over 60 years, the 92NY Discovery Contest has launched the careers of major poets.

Four winners receive a reading here, publication in Literary Hub, a two-night residency at the ACE Hotel, and $500 each.

We'd love to read your work.

Apply via Submittable: https://www.92ny.org/poetry/discovery-contest.aspx

For over 60 years 92Y’s Discovery Contest has launched the careers of major poets like John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Mark Strand, Mary Jo Bang and Solmaz Sharif, to name a few. Will you be next?