Poem archive
Read poems by Arizona and Southwestern writers, plus classic work preserved in the AZPoetry literary archive.
Search by poem title, poet, or a phrase you remember. Each archive page is designed to lead readers toward more poets and related work.
2026
A speaker responds to financial loss by transforming investment language into an increasingly grotesque fantasy of revolt against Wall Street, moving from stock-market frustration into deliberately excessive images of destruction and revenge.
2025
Through a recurring question about whether he counts as American, the speaker contrasts his own beliefs and cultural preferences with conventional symbols and assumptions about patriotism, asking whether criticism and difference exclude someone from national belonging.
2025
Graham looks back across generations of poetry slam, acknowledging its failures, rivalries, mythology and imperfections while arguing that poems need not transform the entire world to matter deeply to an audience—or even to one poet.
2025
Cortez develops the drum as an extended metaphor for women, repeatedly asking why something capable of voice, rhythm and power is subjected to domination, violence and disrespect.
2025
Naughty A. Mouse repeatedly compares sugar with illegal drugs in order to connect an ordinary consumer product to histories of slavery, colonial trade, violence, profit and unequal definitions of criminality.
2025
Daniels revisits the beating of Rodney King and the speaker’s memory of encountering its images, using the recurring word “swing” and the number 56 to confront police violence, race, public witnessing and the persistence of the event decades later.
2025
Hepworth addresses Ritchie Valens directly, tracing a young Mexican American musician’s relationship with guitar, his shortened professional name, his rapid rise and early death, while insisting that his music survives attempts to reshape his cultural identity.
2025
Mabrey imagines revolution as a nearly imperceptible force moving through ordinary moments across history: a Vietnamese boy carrying shoes through gunfire, a child unknowingly playing with a fragment connected to racial violence, and a girl rescuing a book from a military fire.
2025
Fox mimics the nonstop velocity of satellite sports television, combining multiple sports, announcer language and advertising until athletic competition, consumer products and television spectacle become one continuous broadcast.
2025
Flemons remembers going to sleep on September 10, 2001 anticipating the release of Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, only to awaken to September 11. The album becomes inseparable from the collision between an ordinary personal anticipation and an event that abruptly changed the surrounding world.
2024
Structured as a sarcastic Thanksgiving prayer, the speaker repeatedly offers “thanks” for episodes and institutions associated in the poem with destruction, racism, conformity, prohibition, consumerism and the corruption of the American Dream.
2024
Beginning with a warning from her mother and references to popular music, the speaker considers love, whiteness, American history, Indigenous presence and the desire to be valued by people outside one’s own community.
2024
A rock-star persona turns an election campaign into a performance, repeatedly demanding to be elected while mixing patriotic imagery, celebrity swagger, promises and the language of popular entertainment.
2024
The Klute adopts the voice of a fictional Republican hip-hop performer and piles political references, slogans and caricatures into a satirical campaign performance modeled on rap and political advertising.
2024
Shebala uses the language of sports fandom, commercial imagery and stereotypes to confront the contradiction between professed admiration for Indigenous people and the reduction of Indigenous identities to mascots, costumes, products and caricatures.
2024
Flores takes a familiar stereotype about Mexican labor and progressively strips away its apparently complimentary surface, revealing exploitation, immigration pressure, inherited identity, faith, masculinity, and the human cost borne by the speaker’s father.
