Jeevika Verma

One thing most poets are not afraid of is saying what cannot be said.

Oftentimes, those unsayables involve uncomfortable truths about our capitalist society. And in her new book, Popular Longing, poet Natalie Shapero takes a blunt, funny look at the things we'd prefer to avoid.

"A lot of what I try to do in my work is write poems that are in conversation with the ways in which we don't talk about things in a straightforward way," Shapero says. "The way in which we talk around difficult subjects or taboo subjects."

If hope were an object, it would be poet Alex Dimitrov's new book Love and Other Poems.

In its entirety, the book itself is one long love poem — to New York City, to the moon, to the many "scenes from our world" — but it's mostly about what it means to have hope, even when we feel like we're all alone.

Our subconscious knows more about us than our waking selves. And it is often through dreams that we are able to tap into this unknown realm.

Writer Jackie Wang documented her dreams and sculpted them into poems for her debut collection The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void. The book is a surrealist expression of how social processes and traumas show up in our dreams, and how we can better understand ourselves by tuning into them.

"Anytime I'm going through a really difficult experience, I'm always trying to work it out in my dream life," Wang says.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are about to receive an Indian-style welcome to Washington, D.C.

A group of volunteers are putting together a kolam, a traditional South Indian art form used as a sign of welcome, in the nation's capital in honor of the incoming president and vice president. Using 1,800 pieces submitted from the public, the volunteers are assembling a kolam of over 2,500 square feet.