It felt revolutionary that the act of writing could also solve some of the problems it creates. This idea checked out with all those analogies people make between writing and meditation or running or healing—we write through discomfort and find some wholeness on the other side. The challenges tend to be worth it.

I wanted to get together with my fellow poets on the Porter House Review staff and suggest poetry books for all the music lovers out there so that they too might come to love poetry in the same way that I did.

Works that bend genre and experiment with form find a way to resist the singular story that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of in her powerful TED Talk and response to oppression. As Spahr explains, “They are works that negotiate between the dire worries of homogeneity and loss and the utopian hopes of diversity and invention.”