Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.

Angele Ellis: Memory’s Self-portrait

Seeing Things by Marjorie Maddox. Wildhouse Poetry (an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing), 2025.

April 11, 2025 · 4 Comments

Angele Ellis: The life and legacy of Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)

Refaat Alareer stands in a field in Gaza, holding a container of freshly picked strawberries. What evokes the earth’s sweetness more fully than a ripe berry? The expression on his face—scholarly, bespectacled—is gentle and tender.

March 4, 2025 · 7 Comments

Angele Ellis: Love in a Time of Genocide | In Palestine Wail, Yahia Lababidi seeks the redemption of the human soul

Tell me, what steel entered your heart,
what fear made you rabid,
what hate drove out pity?

September 8, 2024 · 1 Comment

Angele Ellis: “I lived in the dark” | In Grace Notes, Naomi Shihab Nye finds the music in poems about families and the incidents and accidents of personal history 

All poetry begins in song, as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds the reader, starting with the title of her latest collection, 117 mostly brief free verse poems that like songs, are both accessible and mysterious.

July 5, 2024 · 7 Comments

Angele Ellis: “no margin on these pages of skin history”

In Every Hard Sweetness, Sheila Carter-Jones weaves a personal and cultural history of racism into poetry. 

May 25, 2024 · 3 Comments

Video: “Mauches” by Angele Ellis

I never learned la bella lingua except
to write you one letter in schoolgirl Italian
from college, a letter you loved so much
it fell into sharp creases

March 9, 2024 · 6 Comments

Michael Simms: Tootling Along

I hope you don’t mind my sharing links to my own recent publications.

September 2, 2023 · 26 Comments

Angele Ellis: Midnight in the Backyard of Lust and Longing

In her new poetry collection, Alexis Rhone Fancher Boldly Explores the Landscape of Sensuality 

May 18, 2023 · 5 Comments

Angele Ellis: “Raised Incorruptible” | In Book of Entangled Souls, Richard St. John tests the boundaries of life and death, compassion and spirituality 

St. John looks deeply and compassionately where others might glance away or move on, and draws the reader along with him.

August 5, 2022 · 6 Comments

Angele Ellis: Dances of Death | In Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling, an experimental young Syrian poet makes his book-length debut in English

What would happen in this vast dagger
If America stopped eating human flesh
For three days?

October 15, 2021 · 6 Comments

Angele Ellis: from Four Way Books / Leonard, Torres, and Cohen

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public.” –Allen Ginsberg

June 4, 2021 · 3 Comments

Angele Ellis: “Subterranean Lovesick Clues” | Alexis Rhone Fancher’s Poetic Topography of Sex

Emotions wrestle with physicality in the twisted sheets of Erotic.

March 2, 2021 · 2 Comments

Angele Ellis: Kelli Stevens Kane’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

In fifty numbered verses—many with the diamond-like compression of Emily Dickinson—Stevens Kane explores how the daily reality of the body suddenly can become extraordinary, paranormal—and how the science of events—such as gravity—can give way to the spiritual…

November 20, 2020 · 1 Comment

Angele Ellis: In Lebanon, 2000 June

It was the summer the Israelis withdrew, leaving
behind
a landmined no-man’s-land of phosphorus orange groves,
blighted with white like the kingdom of the Snow Queen.

September 16, 2020 · 4 Comments

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