What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay.
I cannot stop
collecting recipes, an unexpected
replica of my mother / counting
        calories                     seeing
every        bite               an act
I need to                   undo / loving
cherry blossoms that rain down
each spring, a torrent of pink petals
falling / or burying
my nose in the lilacs that rim
my neighbor's fence / I cannot  
        stop
thinking my body would be               better
if there were less
                 of it
I        cannot talk
politics without getting angry / cannot
do a crossword or win Scrabble
           despite             my extensive
vocabulary / cannot keep
          a houseplant alive
I             can
cook and bake and tell you the exact
calories in a brownie / a carrot / my morning
soy latte / can run ten
                                hike twenty
                                walk thirty
miles / can spend the day
with a book and never
be bored / I can tell you I love
            my dogs more
than anything else / I can
       no longer                         survive
on little sleep but also                can no longer
sleep in / I can tell you
who I am but not
           who I want to be
from the book HER WHOLE BRIGHT LIFE / Write Bloody Publishing
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Cover of Courtney LeBlanc's book, Her Whole Bright Life
What Sparks Poetry:
Andrew Bertaina on Courtney LeBlanc's "Her Whole Bright Life"


"I have always been attracted to visceral writing, that which cuts through or illuminates life as it is lived. Perhaps raising children has made me less patient with ornamentation for its own sake. So, I was delighted to sink into LeBlanc’s world, poems about the death of her father and her relationship to her body, poems that are raw and unvarnished in their honesty about grief, about loss, about the management of the body, all those things we cannot ever really control but still try desperately to."
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Roger Reeves, screen right, at the awards ceremony
Roger Reeves Wins the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize

Of the prize-winning collection the judges wrote: "Among the many remarkable poems in Best Barbarian is ‘Journey to Satchidananda’ in which the poet writes: ‘The Japanese call it Kintsugi. / Where the vessel broken, only gold will permit / Its healing. Its history.’ The beauty of that repair, which does not hide nor erase the evidence of trauma—of history—but transforms it, is the abiding metaphor in this capacious and wide-ranging meditation."

via GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
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