Poetry as a Reflection of the Times
We will be publishing poems in weekly batches and featuring them on Social Media one per day.
Marjorie Moorhead’s poetry collections are Into the Thrum, What I Ask, Every Small Breeze, as well as three chapbooks. Her poems appear in numerous online and print journals, and over 20 anthologies to date. Marjorie is a member of 4thFriday Poets. She lives at the NH/ VT border.
The first stanza rings with despondency and frustration (mentioning war, ICE). Second stanza suggests ways to muddle through, carry on (music, getting chores done), and expresses hope for positive change (“Less imposition of might, more expression of kindness”)
S Stephanie’s poetry, fiction and book reviews have appeared in many literary magazines such as Birmingham Poetry Review, Café Review, Cease, Cows, Clover & Bee, Hole in the Head Review, Iowa Review, One, Rattle, St. Petersburg Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Southern Review, The Sun, Third Coast, Turtle Island Review, Dream Pop, Hamilton Stone Review, and many anthologies. She has three chapbooks out. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art and teaches poetry and writing on both the community and college level. She lives in Rollinsford NH and respects cats.
For those of you who read Heather Cox Richardson daily (and if you don’t, I suggest you do), this poem began as a response to a beautiful photo she posted at the end of January 2026.
The photo reminded me of how we all need to stay hopeful in these dark political times.
Val is a poet and researcher who grew up in Merrimack and now lives in Colorado. Their work vacillates between investigating the modern condition and praising their cats, the most perfect (read: annoying) muses.
Thanks for putting out this call, and considering this poem! This is from an unpublished manuscript called “Hymns to Violence.” Every poem in it (like this one) takes the form of a hymn in order to invert traditional dichotomies including sacred vs. vulgar, lofty vs. low-brow, heaven vs. hell, etc., and thereby reveal a higher synthesis of meaning and emotionality. Hopefully the contrast between the lyricism and the text resonates with you. I would say, “Enjoy!” but this poem instead calls for something like, “Be moved!”
The author is a classically trained theologian who delights in justice as daily work. Poetry is part of that work. She continues to fall in love with Creation, listening to the laughter of trees daily, especially surrounded by the granite and green of New Hampshire.
The natural realm teaches us how to make room for grief as a valued space to begin our work of reclamation of decency and dignity for all people.
“Upon ICE Raiding a Fresh Mark Meat Packing Plant” was Indolent Book’s poem for New Year’s Eve 2018 in their online project, What Rough Beast, which published a poem every day in response to the first Trump administration.
Josh Nicolaisen lives in New Hampshire and teaches writing at Plymouth State University. He holds an MFA from Randolph College, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recipient of the Plattner Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in Hunger Mountain Review, Permafrost, Appalachian Review, Four Way Review, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. Find him at www.oldmangardening.com/poetry
I wrote this sonnet in 2018 shortly after an infamous raid of a meat packing plant in Ohio. I was shocked and sickened by the images and sounds of human beings taken captured and begging not to be deported to nations they did not know. It’s been nearly 6 years since and ICE violence and human rights violations are now daily occurrences in the United States, including multiple additional raids on the same meat packing plant. The piece was initially published in Indolent Books’ online project “What Rough Beast.” With all my heart, I wish this poem had not become more relevant with time.
From With Little Light and Sometimes None at All by Richard Foerster (Littoral Books, 2023); first appeared in Tar River Poetry.
Richard Foerster’s latest collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All (littoralbooks.com), received a Gold Medal at the 2024 Independent Publishers of New England Book Awards. Other honors include two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships and Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize.
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician in rural New Hampshire. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in ONE ART, The Berlin Literary Review, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, The House as Witness, is forthcoming from Quillkeepers Press.
This poem comes from my practice in addiction medicine in rural New Hampshire, where the opioid crisis is not an abstraction. It is the same patients, the same waiting rooms, the same gap between what we criminalized and what we should have treated. The Belknap Mill in Laconia stands preserved while the community it sustained has not been afforded the same care. The poem tries to hold that contradiction alongside the patients I see every day who are trying, imperfectly, to stay alive.
Page Coulter is the author of six books of poetry. Her poems have been published in such presses as Kansas Quarterly, Spectrum, Northern New England Review, and Comstock Review.
She taught poetry in schools in and around New Haven, Connecticut for many years. She now lives in New Hampshire and holds weekly poetry workshops for poets and prose writers.
Even though I care deeply about what is happening in many parts of the world today, and voice my opinion to my congressmen, Ii have stopped watching nightly news and instead have put a wintry scene on it.
Mississippi Poetry Journal (1996), Free Xpressions (2012), Pasques Petals (2015), Pasques Petals (2021) Agates (2024)
Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher who lives with his wife in Iuka, MS. He has over 800 publishing credits in a number of recognized journals.
MFA/creative writing UMass Amherst. Retired after thirty=two years teaching at Northern Essex Community College.
Michael Brosnan is the author of three collections of poetry. A fourth, Pareidolia (Broadstone Books), is due out in April 2026. His poems have won awards from various arts organizations, including the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Michael lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Chris Baral is a poet who loves nothing more than finding inspiration during early morning kayaking. Her poem, “Fractals” was included in the print version of “The Nature of Our Times” (Paloma Press 2025), and “Nesting” in “Look Away Now: Poems of Hope and Despair by Women” (Linen Press 2025).
It is very hard to keep up with all of the bad news lately. Writing poetry helps me to breathe just a little bit easier.
Bob Moore has been writing poetry since the 1990s. He’s released three books of poetry, his latest Body and Soul (Beech River Books, 2018). His poems have appeared in The Lyric, Quill and Parchment, and Piscataqua Poems 2 : A Second Seacoast Anthology. Moore is a member of The Powow River Poets and The Poetry Society of New Hampshire.
I was struggling for a few days after the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. I didn’t know how to respond in writing, did a lot of reading. Then I figured I could channel my despair, my angst into a thought about engaged activism. This poem is a thought about what to do next.
Jane Harkins finds daily life intriguing, providing writing material about everything from discovering a bathtub buried in her backyard to the homeless in Baltimore. Both appalled and fascinated by current day political shenanigans, such goings-on have made their way into her poems as well.
Hugh Beyer has lived in New Hampshire since the 80’s and has raised four children there. Though a programmer by inclination and training, he’s always written poetry and prose, fiction and otherwise. Poetry has been a main focus ever since the pandemic upended all our lives.
Yeats was looking forward to a possible future. Many of us feel that future is no longer “possible”—it’s here, foreseen but still unexpected. And we are all lost, trying to find our way forward in the wilderness.
Brenna Manuel grew up in the mid-west and spent twenty years working as a visual artist in New York City. She now writes short stories and poetry in rural New Hampshire. Her writings have been published in numerous literary journals, and she is a Bridport Prize finalist.
My everyday life is the source of most of my poetry. I often marvel at how our advancing society and our basic human needs come into conflict, as in “Damp.”
Christopher L. Dornin placed runner-up in the 2023 Swan Scythe chapbook contest and semi-finalist in the 2024 Finishing Line book contest, the 2025 Wolfson Press chapbook contest and the 2025 Word Works book contest. He has earned 22 journalism awards and a NH Arts Council fellowship in poetry.
I have an unpolished 10-page poem about Trump. He does so many terrible things every week that a poem published about them a year later will be totally out of date. Take his murdering of people in small boats. The war in Iran eclipses our thoughts about those crimes.
Carlene M. Gadapee’s chapbook, What to Keep (Finishing Line Press, 2025), joins poems and reviews in many journals. Carlene lives and teaches in northern New Hampshire, where she and her husband have fruit trees and beehives. Her next chapbook, Relearning the Body, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (May, 2026).
I often wonder how long the earth will tolerate humankind; we have been given a precious gift, yet we have historically exploited it –and each other– in shameful and, at times, permanently scarring ways.
J. L. Long lives in Rochester, New Hampshire with 1 spouse and 3 cats (exact numbers subject to change). He has the hugest possible writer crush on Shirley Jackson, and his fictional boyfriend is Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
This poem was written in April 2025 in response to New Hampshire state anti-trans legislation, which has continued and, arguably, worsened in 2026.
Previously curated at Riseup Review, April 2025.
Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in Rattle, One Art, and other journals and in her chapbook, Signs of Marriage. Learn more at https://carlapoet.com, or on all social media @cb99videos. Carla Schwartz received the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.
Abigail Marie Mandella is a poet born and raised in New Hampshire. She is training to become a circus performer and hopes to one day publish her poetry professionally.
The creation of this poem happened through angry tears. I hope Hell burns these politicians hot.
Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. In addition to publication in literary magazines, she has published two novels and two photopoetry collections. Liz lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire with her husband. Find her online at https://lizgauffreau.com.
After relying on metaphor to address the chaos the world is in right now, “coming at it slant” was no longer cutting it.
Barbara Bald is a retired NH educator who served on the PSNH Board. Her poetry books include : Drive-Through Window, Other Voices/Other Lives and Running on Empty. Barb worked at the Frost Place in Franconia and NHPTV. She is interested in helping folks, who think they can’t write, write.
In our present climate of hate and othering, as well as personal traumas, so many of us are left feeling powerless and alone. This poem is an attempt to offer hope–especially by engaging with elements of the natural world.
published in New American Writing.
Mark DeCarteret‘s work has appeared in nearly 600 publications.
Who can resist a little satire. Sure, it doesn’t sit well with the witless and swill-seeker. Seems to like having its ire raised. But it also loves to rat out and rate no stars. Stand up to the test of the mighty sword, time. Not only trying to get a rise out of, stir. But mime it all (ironically speaking…). Keeping all of us a bit more honest. Our actual noses tied to some virtual mill stone.
Paul Goodwin is an old poet who has been plying his craft, mostly in Seacoast New Hampshire, for decades. He served for years on the board of the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program and chaired it for three years. His work is featured in this year’s Ten Piscataqua Writers and he reads at several open mic events each month. His first book of poems (Preliminary Observations) is available on Amazon
The temptation for older people to give advice is strong. Resist it!
Beth Fox’s poetry is found The Poet’s Touchstone, The Seacoast Anthology, Covid Springs II, Silver Birch Press, New Verse News, and The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Reaching for the Nightingale was published by Finishinglinepress.com. You will most likely find Beth outdoors or on the water in Wolfeboro, NH.
To know one immigrant’s story is to know the story of many. It is hard to imagine being shipped to a country where you know no one, and from there possibly to the dangerous country you left.
I’ll never know what happened to Mila, or the others in her dorm.
It’s not enough to observe, Lily must give things a voice. She transcribes rivers, birdsong, silence, and the everyday ordinary. She is fluent in painting and poetry. She has published poetry in Three Fingers Review, Mountain Troubadour, Outside the Margin, Wingless Dreamer, Poem City Anthologies. She has self-published two books of poetry.
This poem is a pantoum.
Olivia Walters is a 10th grader from New Hampshire. She began writing poetry in October 2025 and has since received a Regional Silver Key from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Her work is published in The WEIGHT Journal, the 1455 Youth Anthology, and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s Touchstone.
I noticed that the physical landscape of winter encapsulated too poetically the creeping stasis of authoritarianism in this country and it felt too on the nose not to write about.
Wanting to return to the timeless place where poems are born, Cynthia Liepmann writes about her beloveds, her inner world, people and things about which she is curious, and things that appeal to her quirky sense of humor.
Truax was the thirteenth Portsmouth Poet Laureate, the first Maine Beat Poet Laureate, and the current US Beat Poet Laureate. She is so deeply opposed to the rise of fascism in America that she is willing to overthrow this tyrannical government by whatever means possible. She is clinging to the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword. For now.
RescuePoetix | Susan Justiniano is an award-winning bilingual performing poet and teaching artist, whose work centers on matriarchal inheritance, legacy, and healing. Rooted in her Puerto Rican identity, she blends poetry, media, and performance to honor intergenerational stories. Published works appear in journals, anthologies, and community spaces across the diaspora.
“Onward Christian Soul-diers” is an After poem inspired by visual artist William Rhodes’s sculpture Onward Christian Soldier. Written in Cuba, the piece is the result of a conversation about how Rhodes’s work reflects the social conditions Cubans face—conditions shaped by religious, political, and commercial decisions that divide neighbors and families. The poem ties these dynamics to a long global history in which these same forces shape, burden, and define the lives of everyday people.
Jennie lives in Portsmouth NH with her husband, daughter, and two doodles. She spends her time hiking and walking the beach, or sitting at a cafe with endless ice coffees and croissants, always with a notepad in her purse.
I think a lot about how and why certain people view the world so differently. How the oldest generations are the wisest, but are not the ones with a narrative on social media and in general. They are the ones keeping to themselves, living the best they still know how, and we should be watching and listening.
Patrick Bradshaw is a retired electrical engineer who enjoys using both sides of his brain. He currently lives in the greater Nashua area with his wife. His poems have been published in Touchstone, Smoky Quartz, The Mountain Troubadour, and Portrait of New England.
Climate change isn’t the most prominent issue making the headlines right now, but it will still be with us no matter how the other current crises work out.
Cynthia Knorr is the author of A Vessel of Furious Resolve (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Hole in the Head Review, SWWIM Every Day, Café Review, Healing Muse, Nature of Our Times Anthology and many others. She lives in Strafford, NH, serves on the editorial staff of Touchstone, and is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.
Maria lives in Concord, NH with her husband and two Siamese cats. To her delight, their blended brood of 6 adult children all live nearby. Maria wrote her first poem (about her mother) when she was 8 years old. She is a proud member of the Percheron Poets writing group.
I believe that silence is complicity. Writing poetry is one way i shout!
Jocelyn Kaye has been writing since in utero, which may explain the contentious relationship she had with her mother,” states her 2018 poetry collection, SEED VIGILANTES A CATHARSIS THROUGH HAIKU DECADES POST-ASSAULT. With degrees in English and Gerontology, Kaye writes of her experiences with illness, lost identity, and aging.
While the first draft of “Prescience” was written in my late teens or early 20s sans title, I have been revisiting my writings and tweaking accordingly in an effort to find the comfort that only familiarity can bring, satiate my current sensibilities and, appropriately enough, enjoy reflections on my earlier body of work.