Today’s poem is To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “I think some poets will come at me for this, but for a lot of reasons, poetry is like the original meme. Memes are by definition a form, much like a poetic form. You can put different text upon the same picture, and the picture invites a certain read, much like using a sonnet or sestina. Maybe the proliferation of memes has… simplified our expressions of some experiences. But this expansive vocabulary of internet shorthand has also helped me commune and commiserate and connect with the people in my life over the things we feel and see every day. As our listener A. Rafael told us, those poems which really connect are much the same — they put language to a bit of life that feels large and unwieldy inside of us.”

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp