Lawrence Raab was born in Pittsfield, MA and is the author of numerous collections of poetry. He has been a professor of poetry at Williams College since 1976. I found this poem in a collection called Good Poems: Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor. I liked rainy days when you didn't have to go outside and play. At night I'd tell my sister there were snakes under her bed. When I mowed the lawn I imagined being famous Cautious and stubborn, unwilling to fail, I knew for certain what I didn't want to know. I hated to dance, I hated baseball, and collected airplane cards instead. I learned to laugh…

Roger Robinson is a writer and musician who lives in London and Trinidad. His book, A Portable Paradise, won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2019 and the Ondaatje Prize in 2020. Robinson is a spoken-word performer and has worked with a number of bands. He is also the lead vocalist for King Midas Sound. As well as writing poetry and performing, he also has lectured on poetry and performance. And if I speak of Paradise, then I'm speaking of my grandmother who told me to carry it always on my person, concealed, so no one else would know but me. That way they can't steal it, she'd say. And…

James Vincent Cunningham was a poet, critic, translator, and editor. He taught at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. I found today’s poem in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry where it says of his writing, “His fastidious poems adopt cool, classical measures, and he was the contemporary master of the epigram. Though small in bulk and scope, Cunningham’s work is honed to a mordant precision of style and feeling.” And does the heart grow old? You know In the indiscriminate green Of summer or in earliest snow A landscape is another scene, Inchoate and anonymous, And every rock and bush and drift, As our affections alter us Will alter…