Happy National Poetry Month!

In honor of National Poetry Month, Literary Mama has compiled a virtual bouquet of essays, reviews, profiles, and poems that showcases our enthusiastic role in a lively poetic community. Whether you love to read, write, or teach poetry, check out these links, then pass them along. Enjoy!

In Literary Reflections, Vivian Morrow Jones discovers that poetry can affect our lives in unexpected ways, as she reconnects with her mother through Emily Dickinson’s words in “An Inheritance from My Mother: Emily Dickinson.” Other times, events in our lives, such as the birth of a child and the September 11 attacks, affect the way we approach poetry, as Nicole Cooley writes in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Being a Mother and a Poet.”

When seeking poetic inspiration, check out our Profiles & Reviews section, where we have read and discussed Barbara Crooker’s Line Dance, Julia Lisella’s Terrain, Eleanor Stanford’s The Book of Sleep, and Beth Ann Fennelly’s Tender Hooks. Always interested in learning more about poets’ lives and work, we have interviewed writers Jayne Pupek and Rachel Tzvia Back, as well as poetry critics such as Sylvia Plath scholar Kate Moses.

Month after month, our Poetry section features new poems not only from well-known authors such as Barbara Crooker, Ruth Daigon, and Anna Evans, but also from talented newcomers. This April’s poems are sure to move you.

Don’t forget to check out what our editors are up to: Poetry Editor Sharon Kraus has written two well-received books of poetry, Generation and Strange Land, and Creative Nonfiction Editor Susan Ito has co-edited A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption. As always, check out what we’re reading; for April, it’s our favorite poetry, natch.

Happy Poetry Month, everyone!