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In this first episode of our Poetry Bites specials, poet Graham Pergande takes a deep dive into Dorsey Craft's poem "The Pirate Anne Bonny Does Not Care About Football" from Shenandoah's Spring 2020 issue. Find it at www.shenandoahliterary.org.

Irène Mathieu's writing is wrought across generations and epochs, but also in the rhythms of her own life as a black woman in America. Her day job as a practicing pediatrician influences how she feels language and history lodge themselves in the body, and what poetry can or can't do about it. We talked about how she thinks through her place in her own and in her family’s history, and what time itself means in when reckoning with historical patterns of oppression.

Leah Naomi Green's poetry and prose express the intimate and wild connections she cultivates (literally and figuratively) between herself, her family and community, and the greater than human world. Her life as a homesteader in rural Virginia both shapes and is a product of her poetic imagination and her expansive cosmology. Her first book of poetry, The More Extravagant Feast, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and is published by Graywolf Press.