“How could there be a war in this city?” is the plaintive question that starts Oksana Makysymchuk’s “Arguments for Peace”. Like ours, the world of her poem holds both the “goodness of the universe” and “a foreign leader / warning of invasion”. She offers no pat answers for what to do in the face of conflict — just a dizzying sense of disbelief and the deep desire to hold tight to the people and life around us.

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Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and translator. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

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In Armen Davoudian’s casually intimate poem “Coming Out of the Shower”, mother and son perform their morning routines in the small, shared space of their household’s only bathroom. She chats and puts on her makeup, while he showers and uses her shampoo and robe — oh what rhythm, affection, and ease are to be seen in this dance they both know so well.

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Armen Davoudian has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry Magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and currently lives in California.

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Some religions and some people have very specific ideas about “grace”, and that includes poet Orlando Ricardo Menes. In the carefully constructed “Grace”, he manages to both demystify and remystify what grace is, leaving us with the possibility that at any moment or no moment it could pour down and quench us all. Intrigued? Confused? Give this episode a listen.

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Orlando Ricardo Menes teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor of English. He is also the author of several other works of poetry, including Memoria, Fetish, and Heresies. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

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