BPS Recap For Wednesday, October 7th and 14th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights 10/07

• Dan Malloy wrote about being descended from Salem witches, and how he owes his existence to the fact that one of them was not hanged at the stake

• Alia returned with a poem (“Grass that mirrors upon you, Birds”) that got them through a really tough winter, and per usual, they read it in both Greek and English

• Scott’s “I fell in love with a magician” poem that was “written in the parking lot of Planet Fitness” questioned how much of the said events in the poem actually happened, and how much was actually magic

• Abby M’s love poem between two trees, Shivank’s love poem that was actually the first thing they ever read on the open mic, and Mina’s lurid and romantic poem about “watching women eat” which was way more wholesome than it sounds on paper!

• Chaos in the last chance Haiku slam: Jack made it to the finals after accidentally signing up on the wrong list, and Sue Savoy won after this recapper convinced her to sign up at the last second!

Feature 10/07

This Wednesday was our qualification slam to select our VOXPOP representative this year! VOXPOP is a weekend-long slam tournament in New Hampshire, and this slam came with a slightly different set of rules: you have 7 minutes across all three rounds, with no cuts happening. Highlights include two WTF brain hallucination poem streams by Tim G, and great work by Len (“Inside me there are 2 seagulls fighting over 1 French fry, an endearing poem about looking for a partner who can love all the messy piles and unclean rooms in their life). In the end, Boston slam titans Jennifer Martinez and Will Leonard rose to the top of the scores, delivering tried and true work, with Jennifer winning and becoming our VOX POP representative this year!

Open Mic Highlights 10/14

• This was one of the coziest open mics of the year, with everyone going under 3 minutes (!) and nobody being left on the wait list / lacking the time to say what they wanted to say!

• For Bailey’s poem I have written down “sentient beef,” “folding yourself into packages,” and “Am I allowed to gnaw on your corroded artery? Maybe….”

• Only Nick Roberts would write a poem about the 960th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings!

• We’ve reached a point where I can no longer single out poems about wolves on the open mic, but noq have to choose which one to highlight! This week, Winston not only went meta about the location of their internal wolves but also invoked God joining the audience in the Cantab basement, and then painted a portrait of God going to therapy for their God complex. The wolves rabbit hole is deep, and not filled with rabbits.

• Isaiah read 9 haiku about how they would vote for all the ballot questions that are listed on the MA election next month!

Feature 10/14

This week it was the 4th annual HAIKU TOURNAMENT, a marathon stream of haiku that strikes fear in the hearts of all our poets who usually write three-minute poems on our open mics and open slams! 11 poets braved the gauntlet of multiple haiku suites, including themed rounds of Dirty Haiku and Experimental Haiku, in an attempt to get to the final round and win the grand prize of $200. In the running were March, Edie, Jack W, defending champion Jarvis, Briana, Kai, Len, Stevie S, Danielle, and Abbie L. As the host and curator of this event, I’m always met with pushback with getting people to write 20 haiku for this tournament, to the point where tonight had an actual HAICOUP D’ETAT by both the audience and slammers in the final round, demanding that the haiku madness must stop! The final round featured a death match of Len vs Briana vs Edie, with BRIANA finally emerging as our Haiku champion this year! Next year, the final round will be shorter, I promise :) :) :) :)

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we are back with another extended open mic and a feature from poet leena aboutaleb!

BIO: leena aboutaleb is an Egyptian and Palestinian writer who asks you to commit to the Palestinian liberation struggle. She is the author of THALASSA (Game Over Books, 2026). Her pamphlet, Expeditions of Projection, was released in 2023 (VIBE). Her film, ‘Oracle,’ co-produced with Youssef ElNahas debuted in Venice, 2025. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow, a Kundiman fellow and McCormick Writing Center scholar. Read her work at www.leenaboutaleb.onl.

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, September 23rd and 30th, 2026

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It’s been a long time coming for these recaps which were originally lost and are now found!

Open Mic Highlights 09/23

• “I’m living in an Edward Hopper world on the Red Line” – Dan Malloy

• “I might do the unthinkable and give care to myself” – from Farah’s caretaker poem

• The return of Aanchal, who read a corporate burnout poem and discussed the two things to run back and save during a house fire: their laptop and their bra

• Emma’s “Apocalypsetick,” Keaton and Will S adding to the pile of wolf poems that are waiting on the doorstop of the Cantab basement

• March Penn on setting up the Cantab chairs and appreciating both the clean emptiness of them, as well as how they are about to be filled with poets as opposed to workers

Feature 09/23

Alejandro Jimenez was our feature this week, and he read a well-constructed set revolving around his Mexican heritage, the collision of English and Spanish on both sides of the border, and the throughline of his work in relationship to the past and future generations of his family. Alejandro blessed us with his incredible stage performance, the polyrhythmic music and flow of his poems, and some enlightening banter that doubled as insight into where his poems come from. “My spirit will find its home in the mouths of my people” is a line that resonated strongly throughout the set, and the highlight was a long poem detailing how four generations of women in this family dance. For the closer he wonderfully sang “Paloma Negra” as done by Chavela Vargas, and then wrote into the experience of it, both analyzing and emotionally reacting to it, before launching into the song again. Thank you, Alejandro!

Open Mic Highlights 09/30

• “When you say ‘I’ll always be here for you’ I don’t think you understand how breakups work” – from Abby M’s great poem to the person who broke up with them

• Edie going meta about the cult of BPS regulars writing about wolves, and how said cult has stole the wolves that are inside him

• Jericho with a timely and poignant poem about the Cornell 7

• Helena’s meditation on daylight savings, fall becoming winter (“these f!*%ing leaves, man!”) and actually enjoying it all

• “Amy called me the patron saint of biting people” / “I told him I was the bones of Amelia Earhart” / “Icarus was the first Mothman” – some of the twists and turns from Shivank’s awesome poem this week!

• Abbie L’s “I wish I was with my friends” poem that was written during the lunar eclipse (we love a great friendship poem!)

• Did you hear Sue Savoy has a new book out focused on poems about the MBTA? She read from it this week, and you can get yourself a copy if you see her in person on a future Wednesday!

• Jaimie’s sweet poem-prayer about the 24 (?!) people who call her mom, grandma, or aunt

• “We are poetry grease goblins” / “Lock the doors before reality sneaks in the back” – Kai

• Amy’s contrapuntal about some of the lessons they’ve learned from their mom (“Be afraid of pretty like you are of God” / “Never be bleeding and afraid”)

Feature 09/30

This week it was an open slam! It was full of debut slam appearances by open mic regulars Emma, Jayda, and Len, plus the return of Jess, Isaiah, and Shawn. Emma finished second with a fresh trans take on the Ship of Theseus, a dialogue-and-plot juxtaposition with Jesus (!) and wanting to babble/babel in many languages, but the slam was won by first-time-on-our-stage poet Richie Nbiba! Every once in a while, we get a poet who signs up for the slam out of nowhere and blows us away, and this was one of those nights! Opening up with a sestina (“How does the fire know”) and a duplex on running, plus finishing with a litany using the recurring line “What the ebony needs,” Richie had the audience and judges impressed from the get-go. Both Ritchie and Emma will qualify for the 2027 BPS team selection slam happening in the Winter!

– MFG 🚪

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Tonight’s Show 10/07/26!

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Hey all,

Our wordpress/publishing software is currently going through an update, so the recaps from the past two weeks should hopefully re-appear soon. Right now we can at least tell you about our upcoming show tonight!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This Wednesday we have an early bird workshop with Kel Monroe at 6:30 pm, our extended open mic, and another open slam. But not just any slam: it’s the qualification slam to select our VOXPOP representative this year!

VOXPOP is a weekend-long slam tournament in New Hampshire with both indie and team components. The indie slam on Friday night, November 13th, has a cash prize of $400, and the organizers have reserved slots for venue representatives.

The rules are a little different from the normal slam: you have 7 minutes across all three rounds, with no cuts, so make sure you have some shorter poems prepared (one 3 minute poem and two 2 minute poems, two 3 minute poems and one 1 minute poem … etc). Time penalties are deducted at the very end of the slam. We’re excited to see what you bring!

Workshop description:

Activating Surrealism in Poetry by Kel Monroe

In this hands-on workshop / sofa, we’ll explore how surreal imagery can deepen poetry, surprise readers, and open access to the strata of strange emotional material beneath our so-called everyday experience. Through close reading, discussion, dreams, cultural imagery, and writing prompts, participants will explore finding and wielding the surreal in their own poems, whether subtly or with outrageously brazen staircases.

See you tonight!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, September 16th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Your weekly wolf-themed poems update: Bailey (“Were you assigned democrat or republican at birth?”) is just 2 wolves in a trenchcoat, and is asking you if you would like to believe in an omnipotent/simulated wolf brain instead of a god

• Kyle on the queer-coded and homoeroticism of the high school swim team

• The return to the mic of old friends Jacq (“there are ghosts wherever you decide to show up”) and Adam Goldberg (celebrating their birthday and 20 years since their first time with a skewed poem about going on an Emerson College tour)

• Jarvis on compartmentalization and feeling your feelings instead, Alex on quantum mechanics and alternate Alexes, Sue Savoy writing about March Penn reading the tarot, and Ward’s awesomely dark and unintentionally funny “Eulogy to a Sandwich”

• Speaking of March Penn, they got the whole crowd talking in a sock puppet voice, and discussing the (imaginary) line between poetry, thin ice, and freak shit! Only the third sock puppet poem I’ve seen on the mic in 16 years (and I’m responsible for one of them!)

• “I am the mother of the seeds of doubt” – from new regular She-Wisdom

• Our haiku slam was back this week with a full roster of 8 poets who signed up at the last minute! There was some funny work from Tim and Eli (“I really need this $17 to buy some more marlboros,”) and a great series of “Nightcap” themed haiku by Stevie Subrizi, but the final round came down between Len and Aparna. While Len impressed in their haiku debut (including a great haiku about wearing jeans on a plane!) Aparna once again showed why they have made the Haiku tournament finals three years in a row, with meta haiku about Ocean Vuong and open mic regular Shivank. Aparna won the $17 and is qualified for next month’s Haiku tournament along with Len!

Feature

Hieu Minh Nguyen was our feature tonight, and was a big part of the reason almost everyone stayed at our show late into the night (Did we mention that Ocean Vuong and Mckendy Fils-Aimé were a couple of notable names sitting in the audience?) Hieu read from their new book “Staying Still”, showcasing many poems that started unassumingly with a small scene from their life before quickly exploding inwardly and outwardly with insight and precision, never outlasting their welcome. My notes are full of juicy asides and intros to poems: “This is about how every time I want to make a huge change I give up all my pleasures,” “In this piece I am talking about trying to convince my body not to die,” “This was a speech I wrote for my high school reunion that I never went to,” “How was I to know beauty was something I could ruin for others by trying it on,” “I’ve read a threesome poem at all my Cantab features, let’s continue the tradition,” “Even in the gallery of the beheaded you’ll find mouths to feed.” Thank you Hieu!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, along with our extended open mic, we will have a rare Boston feature from Alejandro Jimenez, runner up at the 2023 World Poetry Slam Championship, representing Mexico!

Feature Bio: Alejandro Jimenez is a nationally and internationally recognized poet and writer from Colima, Mexico, living in New Mexico. His work centers and touches on cultural identity, race/ethnicity, immigrant narratives, masculinity, memory, and the intersection of them all. He was featured in TIME Magazine as one of 80 Mexican artists shaping contemporary Mexican culture. His work, and personal story, are the subject of a short documentary for the PBS series, American Masters: In The Making, which highlights emerging cultural icons. Representing Mexico, he was runner-up at the 2023 World Poetry Slam Championship in Rio de Janeiro. He is a 2025 International Latino Book Award Finalist.

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, September 9th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• First off, a word of appreciation to our contingent from Worcester, Artemis (“We don’t restrict ourselves to Onlys”) and Bailey (“Sunlight making crowns across my body”) who have often been the first two people on our open mic the past couple months. Thanks for opening our show up in style!

• Soon there will be an official BPS Wolves correspondent, giving you updates on all the latest wolves-themed poems and wolves-variant poems that are now happening every single week on the open mic! This week Emma and Abby M (with Quolls subbed into for wolves) added excellent work into this archive that gets stronger with each passing day.

• We got to hear work from regulars that we haven’t heard from in a while, including Helena (“sometimes you walk into a room with open eyes on purpose,”) Otto Vock (Who wrote about the poets who work diligently to keep up their poetry-related education gigs even while they are constantly being taken away from them”) and Jade Kleiner (an erasure of “War of the Worlds” turned into a mediation on inheriting their mother’s mania)

• March’s raw and therapeutic piece on how chronic pain continues to wreak havoc on their life and the places they manage to escape it

• During the smoking section, Aparna wrote thoughtfully on how “the elephant in the room” is actually feeling, and Amy got to do a reprise/re-working of their Chicago Rathole poem that incorporated both the Cantab/BPS and their parents (who were both in the room!)

Feature

We had an open poetry slam this past week, and there was no shortage of heavy hitters who are already in peak season form! We had great work from newbies Kay (“Do you reach into the rubble and grow?”) and Len, while slam veteran Stevie Subrizi brought us polished mini-poems on trans-synthesizer legend Wendy Carlos and how trans defiance can be intertwined with the lyrics to The Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket”. Our final pairing came down to the visiting Muzat (who has been giving us extremely strong and raw memorized work while they are in town this month from Texas) and 2026 BPS team member Mugs Myers. Both qualify for the 2027 team selection, with Mugs taking home the win and the $75!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, you won’t want to miss a feature from one of our favorite out-of-town poets, Hieu Minh Nguyen! We’ll also have our extended open mic and our monthly Haiku Slam (you’ll need 3 haiku for a chance to win $17.) See you there!

Feature Bio: Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of three poetry collections, including This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, and Staying Still (Tin House Books, 2026). His honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He earned his MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

It was one of those weeks where I (Michael F. Gill) wrote a haiku about each poem on the open mic, and then read them all at the end of the open mic! Here they all are:

Bailey

i’m a mummy
with iridescent scales—
god has a sense of humor

Mazat

my brain is a crater
burying decades
of ancestral outrage

Edie

we end the heartache
by rubbing our nipples
while everyone watches

Tim G

don’t empty the silo
to double your money—
raise banana trees

Abby M

I need 11 months alone.
How long is the bus ride
to Sydney?

Charlie R

grey whales bellow
below our collective seas—
i have got to come down

Jenn M

love is a million second comings
alive in your chest
earthquaking

Jayda

what to do when you are
waiting for a bus:
write haiku forever

Farah

be be be don’t don’t don’t
with so many rules
how does one fall in love

Isaiah

fond memories of
chocolate truffles
while browsing missed connections

Eri

data points
jagged shadows
storms dotting on an old film reel, spinning

Nick R

from the nose and mouth: blood.
dictators come
but they never really go.

Anh

love you had
but weren’t able to express:
salt burning my nostrils

She Wisdom

i am so emotional—
sometimes people
are just too peopley

Jay G

the past is gone
and walking next to me:
strangers in the rain, we talk

Tom Daley

the sign behind you reads
“HAIKU PRIMARE”:
here is a child’s first haiku

Abbie L

you can leave:
a city is not a place
someone was built to stay in

Sue S

every word in your head
superimposed
on top of another word

Stevie

all we did was breakup songs—
then we broke up for real—
we love the sun

Will S

this moment here is so fresh
how would you like
to hear a brand new song?

Will L

i keep writing this haiku….
17 syllables…..reasonable!

Ward

on remaining and remaining
and remaining:
i’m choosing to stay

Kai

in stars and time:
how many of our memories
are stuffed inside them

Aparna

when i say fuck i mean fuck
when he says fuck
birds fall from the heavens

Brynna

hair maintenance but you
replace the word “hair”
with the word “depression”

Myles

i make a joke
about being too punk for this haiku
and it ends

Feature

Skyelyn Riggs-Davis was our featured poet this week! Skyelyn gave us a set that was full-on theater, packed with story-telling and queer poems that were all memorized (“off the dome!”), and even the transitions between each poem felt like advances in the plot of a larger movie taking place. While we did hear great work about going to Kansas right after it was added to the Trans do-not-travel list, and a bi-sexual skewering of Shakespearean sonnets, the most moving and raw moments of the night were where Skyelyn performed poems about their brother and sister while they were in the audience, seeing Skyelyn perform live for the first time. One of the more unique features we’ve had this year!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have our traditional extended open mic and an open poetry slam! If you have 3 original poems that are 3 minutes or less, you can compete! The winner gets $75, and the top 2 slammers get invited to the 2027 BPS Team Selection Slam.

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 26th

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Open Mic Highlights

• Edie inadvertently (or was it advertently) re-started his Brockton vs Chicago feud with Amy by reprising his “5 outlandish facts about Brockton” poem about how Brockton is the *true* Windy city. Amy, for what its worth, responded for a second time with a great new poem written at the bar, deconstructing the sound and the many definition(s) of the word “Windy”, and landing on the line “What good is it to be correct if you are a poet?”

• Abby M’s sweet tale of office friendship and the bittersweet reveal of their upcoming job interview with with a different company

• Open mic regular Jocelyn gave us a great farewell-for-now poem! I can’t confirm if this is accurate, but the line I have written down for it is “I’ll trade you my dreams for unused isotypes” (!)

• In Jack’s piece, his contact lens broke inside his eye, so he spent the day unintentionally winking at people while waiting for treatment, which led to a meditation on perception and also, ridiculousness

• Who else but Nick Roberts would write a sonnet entitled “Richard Nixon as Chronos”

• March re-read an Allston Christmas classic: “the mouth of ephemera kisses me back”, Dani gave us our first really sexy poem in a while, and the recurring poem theme of “Inside me there are two wolves” reached critical mass when the audience spontaneously howled in the middle of Tim G’s poem!

Feature

Tonight we had our now-annual Allston Christmas FOUND POEM slam! After a last-second sacrifice group piece by yours truly and Shivank (we literally worked it out 20 seconds before we went on stage!) we had 10 poets come on stage to battle for a glowing pile of discarded detritus that Myles and Zeke found on the street!

Highlights:

• Shawn’s found post of “What will make my son less likely to drink a white monster energy drink?”

• Newcomer Celia’s esoteric Facebook group post(s) about the strange things people keep in jars, and how to preserve them (it’s better if I don’t go into the gory details!)

• Edie’s real-life letter from the Dean of their university asking for a disciplinary meeting after the theatre group crossed the line by performing a play that crossed the clergy with graphic LGBT sexuality

• Isaiah’s re-write of a speech from the TV show “Survivor”, with all the pronouns changed to the word “Empire”, and all mentions of the word “Island” replaced by word “Earth.”

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have a feature from Arizona’s Skyelyn Riggs-Davis, and an early bird workshop by a well-known Cantab-regular-of-the-past, Tom Daley! Workshop starts at 6:30, open mic starts at 8, feature at 10!

Workshop description: We’ll be taking a look at the sonnet and how to use it as a love poem and a political poem. We’ll start by reading two Shakespearean sonnets, one from the nineteenth and one from the twentieth century. We’ll discuss the form, and then start working on our own poem.

Feature Bio: Skyelyn Riggs-Davis is a transgender performance poet from Mesa, Arizona. His work predominately tackles queer struggle, family dynamics, and what it means to be an Arizonan in a rapidly changing landscape. In 2024 he toured with Ghost Poetry Show, and in 2026 with Body Slam, competing regionally at Chicharra Poetry Slam Festival in Albuquerque, NM and Bigfoot Poetry Festival in Portland, OR. Skyelyn is the current 2026 Arizona State Poetry Slam Champion. In July of 2025, he went on to place 4th at the Blackberry Peach National Poetry Slam. Skyelyn represented Arizona again at the national competition in 2026, winning first place in the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition. Since 2024, Skyelyn has hosted BODY SLAM with Atlas St. Cloud and Evie O’Toole- a wrestling-themed, bracket-style poetry event in Phoenix.

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 19th

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Open Mic Highlights

• Shawn welcomed the ire and heckles of the audience by performing “Golden Silence” to start off the open mic. You guessed it, it was a silent poem! Some of the heckles included “What makes it golden?” “John Cage?” and “Is this freak shit or thin ice?”

• We’ve had a lot of newcomers on the mic post-Northbeast! Shout out this week to Sabrina, Ellie, and Hallie’s “Lovesick Ramblings Of A Sociologist”

• Edie on ADHD “waiting mode”, where you can’t enjoy anything in the present because you have plans to do something later on that day

• Will S’ defiant and persistent ode/manifesto of W-H-I-M-S-Y

• Returning poet Abby (as opposed to open mic regular Abbie) read about eating a Nutella ice cream cake for 7 straight mornings because, well, they miss you

• Aparna delivered a poem reflecting on creating yogurt and its living cultures, which is only the third yogurt poem I’ve heard on the open mic in 15 years, but well worth it!

• On the opposite end of the spectrum, Stevie Subrizi made sure we made it THREE WEEKS IN A ROW where a poem about a plague of locusts was read on the mic! Is this catching on?

Feature

The tag team slam returned tonight! Teams of two battled it out for $75 apiece and the chance to be invited to the 2027 BPS team selection slam. After an indie sacrifice by Myles, and a group piece sacrifice by Will S and yours truly, the slam started in earnest with some tried-and-true individual work that was great to hear again, like Amy’s piano-playing metronome piece, Will L’s poem after Carlos Williams, and Jarvis’ Letters from Grindr, but as expected, the team group pieces stole the show! Amy and Shivank’s “I was naked once” (not the title of the poem, but the first line!) mused deeply and dramatically about the absence of cream cheese on a bagel, Abbie and Edie pitted the archetypes of the architect and the engineer against each other, and Will and Jarvis braved and bared it all with a poem centeried on their experiences with STIs. The big winners were the team of Abbie and Edie (“Ebie”), who were the most consistent in the eyes of the judges! Lots of fun and great poems were had by all!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, come out for our annual ALLSTON CHRISTMAS SLAM! Celebrating Moving Day across the city and all of the treasures we find on the sidewalks, this will be a FOUND POEM slam — anything you “found” works. It could be a flyer on the street, an email in your inbox, a post from your feed, or something you overheard on the sidewalk. Poets will slam their found piece head-to-head and the winner will get a selection from our prize pile!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 12th

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Open Mic Highlights

• Edward Gault’s magical realism tale of “The Sink That Ate Hyde Park”, filled with nightmares of dirty dishes howling at him, potential radiation poisoning, and jail time instead of getting the key to the city

• “I want someone to find me in the place where the electricity comes from” – from Edie’s poem about the ghost light in the theatre

• “The flea that bit John Donne could never understand this” – Nick Roberts on platonic love

• New ways to read a poem aloud: Abbie L’s piece had the audience make buzzer sounds every time Abbie raised their hand, and when Will S kept his hat on, he read from an old poem, and when he took his hat off, he read from a new poem that commented on his old poem

• Response poems galore: Sue Savoy on recency bias after an Aparna poem that was after Zeke Russell, and Kai writing about an “indeterminate amount of wolves,” after Abbie’s poem that was after Shivank

• We had another short-but-sweet Haiku slam, featuring some new work by Ed and first-timer Ember, but in the final round Edie (using the tried-and-true method of writing meta haiku about the host) took the victory over Mar!

Feature

Stevie Edwards returned to the Cantab to feature for the first time in 14 years! A no-nonsense poet whose straightforward style engaged the audience before slowly revealing a cutting talent for momentum and moment-capture, Stevie breezed through a set revolving around themes of new-found sobriety, (pan)sexuality, and the decision to not have children (see also our recent feature by Chiara Di Lello!) We also got our second (!) poem in two weeks about (being) a plague of locusts, a poem about animals that self-reproduce (and others who wish they could do so), a striking litany survivor poem about “what we carry”, and a good old-fashioned nerdy piece about competing in marching band. Thanks Stevie!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, it is the return of the TAG TEAM SLAM! Poets will sign up in teams of two and face off against each other in a three-round competition. In round 1, each team member will send up one team member to perform an original poem. In round 2, the teams will send up the other team member to perform an original poem. In the FINAL round, the remaining teams will each send up a group piece featuring both team members!

The winners will get $75 and the top two teams will qualify to try out for the 2027 BPS slam team!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 5th

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Open Mic Highlights

• One of our 2026 Northbeast workshop leaders Leticia opened up the mic with a piece melding locust plagues with human intimacy and physical touch

• We had a lot of first and second timers on the mic this week! Shout out to Austin, Len (“Things that feel intimate but maybe aren’t”), Alexus (“when I was a kid / I was a velveteen rabbit”), Willa, and Lindsey

• Meredith’s ode to cooking (“the least amount of pots used wins”), Jocelyn’s slow creep through the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum through an abundantly hot day, and Mar’s personal experience with parents with multiple children who claim they don’t play favorites

• In the freak shit column, Finn detailed a long and flirty DM conversation with spinach, and Shivank wrote a kind of abecedarian that included numbers (“1A” “2J” “10K” ) along with the letters, and then followed that up with a poem in disguise as a list of sharks

• I can’t say this describes Jason’s poem accurately, but what I have written down for it is “so, life is running its tongue against the socket of a dirty lamp’s electricity…”

• Sue Savoy did a meditation on how it would be impossible to watch a movie of her life, Jarvis regaled us the tale of ripping his pants in Natick at Level 99, and Briana closed the mic with a bittersweet poem about how Boston is constructed for leaving and transience, how it seems made for distant memories

Feature

Beloved poet and former BPS staff member Kat Anderson was the feature tonight, reading from her first collection “Etymology of Break” as well as some brand new work! All the trademark(™) elements of Kat’s work was on full display: her love of photography (a disposable camera was passed around for the audience to use), well-constructed contrapuntals, themes of lust/regret, poems about queer joy and the love of community spaces that were published in small zines and local publications, the indefinable sense of self (“I am an adjective the refuses to be in the dictionary”), and a touch of the silly/ridiculous where she read some of her first attempts at poetry in 7th and 8th grade. Thanks Kat! Welcome back.

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, renowned poet Stevie Edwards returns to feature at the Cantab, and we also will have our normal open mic that will include our monthly haiku slam!

BIO: Dr. Stevie Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Weather Inside (University of Arkansas Press, 2026), Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls. Her work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, SAFTA Firefly Farms, and Buinho Creative Hub

– MFG 🚪

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