Black flowers, black flowers. These umbrellas, these "black flowers," offer a passing refuge from the rain, and Justice's poems offer similar refuge from worn-out ways of seeing and imagining.

Pinsky brings this sense of his origins into “Jersey Rain,” from our April 2000 issue. In the poem, he imputes a sort of magic to the rain of his native state: ...

W. S. Merwin, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, reads his poem “Rain Light” from his home in Hawaii. You can find the text of the poem below. It was at our second meeting, in New York for an ...