Paul Guest
@paulmguest.bsky.social
Poet and memoirist. Published in Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Whiting Award Winner and Guggenheim Fellow.
I am available for poetry manuscript consultations. I've done manuscript consultations for Frontier Poetry and I was a Visiting Professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2022, as well as being the author of 4 books, the last two from Copper Canyon. Rates are flexible. nikkiwallschlaeger@gmail.com
Thanks to Poetry Magazine for featuring my poem. At the link you can read it or listen to me reading it. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...
“What is the Greek word for mercy? / What is the capital of Kansas? / Who perished in the fire, / made anonymous by ash / but mourned all the same, in public?” — @paulmguest.bsky.social, “Hey Siri”
Thank you to Leah Umansky for snapping this photo of my poem in the October issue of Poetry.
Please donate to my GoFundMe if you can. gofund.me/33cdc5d4e
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To recap: Iran: There is no deal Israel: There is no deal Trump: Deal approved!
Excited for two poems from my next book to appear in American Poetry Review.
Excited for two poems from my next book to appear in American Poetry Review.
the school year just ended and I already miss indoctrinating students into cultural Marxism and extremist gender ideology
“I pray for your career. / That you aren’t crushed by the stupid and the vacant. / For whatever is left / of imagined, impossible careers: / dyspeptic soda jerk dying in Frazier, Indiana; / a librarian in Pompeii” — @paulmguest.bsky.social, “I Hope for Everything”
I think all the time about Jack Kerouac heckling Frank O’Hara that he was ruining American poetry & O’Hara responding without a beat, “That’s more than you ever did for it”
I'm speedrunning my train of thought upon reading this, but I'm thinking about all of the pressure put on young people to work hard & get a good job & never do anything that might fuck up your employability & yet when you enter the workforce the assaults on your dignity never stop.
Michael Sainato@msainato.bsky.social · 6mo ago'Uber for Nurses' apps are lobbying aggressively against regulations as they expand across the US. They include allowing workers to "bid" on gig shifts with the lowest wage bid winning the gig www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
if you invented public libraries today, every opinion page in the country would be arguing for means tested subsidized Amazon Prime memberships
Cake or Death@johngcole.bsky.social · 7mo agoyes you fucking morons free preschool for everyone or it becomes just "free preschool for the poors" and then you call them leeches and ask for tax breaks when really we want free preschool for everyone because we want smart well adjusted kids why is this so hard? www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/n...
Know I told you it was okay to leave me. Why'd you believe me? You always believed me.
This era and political movement have revealed beyond a doubt that many Americans simply don’t think non-Americans matter, or that they are actually even people. There is no way around this conclusion. As a nation, we must agree to accept we are part of a vibrant, larger world, not its master.
It makes so much sense to put ALL these villains on TV, non-stop, for ongoing viral-video interrogations—to get them to slip up, to say something that pisses him off, to look weak— because the only thing that matters to this guy is what happens on the tube
a man in a top hat stands next to a child and says " goggles on please "
Alt: Mike TV from Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory
media.tenor.com
When AOL and Prodigy started taking off in the early 90s, our neighbor bought a bunch of cement slab and busted it up and sold it online as "Real Pieces of the Berlin Wall" and "Real Pieces of the Great Wall of China" and that guy realized what the internet was gonna be before everyone else
the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity
I say this three times a day and mean it more every single time, but what is going ON?????
one of my strongest beliefs is that we're in our situation right now bc some of the most prominent talking heads (e.g. joe rogan, andrew schulz) are learning about politics in their 40s and 50s, instead of their teens and early 20s, and we have to go along for the ride as they learn basic things
In less than a week the Kennedy Center has effectively closed and our local DC paper has been gutted, both by billionaires. I don’t think immigrants are our problem in this country.
