"The world is lost in its noise...."

A little poetry to help you through the madness.

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

Greetings and salutations! Right about now you’d normally find a brand spankin’ new interview in your (e)mailbox, but I’m currently on vacation. The past seven weeks have been the longest year of my life and Mama needs a break.

But I didn’t want a week to go by without sending something and I thought if you, too, are completely, utterly gutted by all that’s going on in the world, perhaps a little poetry might help. Not poetry written by me—the best I could pull off is a cliché-riddled haiku about my cat—but poems by those who have the ability to, as Buddy Wakefield says, go “behind the doorway” and use language to help the rest of us make sense of the madness.

I found myself listening to more poems after my recent interviews with Buddy, poet Kindall Gant, and thriller author Gillian McAllister, who uses The Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day as inspiration for her writing. (You’ll get that interview next week.) So I put together a playlist of so…