Senses awaken in summer hours, whether they're spent in stifling cities, sleepy countrysides, or on breezy shores. Soundscapes swell to accommodate the rhythms of outdoor gatherings, and scents waft—a tableau vivant of life in all its forms. To mark the season, CULTURED asked three groundbreaking contemporary poets to share dispatches from their summer getaways.

Danez Smith

How does a life accumulate? How does it write itself on skin, and leave its mark on our insides? Danez Smith reckons with these questions through their explosively present poetry, which mines humor as much as pain. Following their acclaimed poetry collections Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead, their newest compilation of poems, Bluff, will publish in 2024. A scribe of a Black, queer experience, Smith penned this poem from their Minneapolis home.

CAConrad

CAConrad fell for poetry as a child, rummaging through library shelves to absorb the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Emily Dickinson. In 2005, Conrad began developing their (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, structures that instigate an “extreme present” in which to write. Today, they live just up the Connecticut River from the place where Dickinson spent her life: Amherst, Massachusetts. This summer, their work—nearly five decades’ worth—will be honored with a show of poetry as art objects at the Batalha Centro de Cinema in Porto, Portugal. To mark the occasion, they share a poem from their forthcoming book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, a collection of odes to yearning, the weather’s consequences, and the passing of time.

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros writes from the in-between. The Chicago-born author is a citizen of Mexico and the United States, a maestro of both poetry and prose, and a transgenerational voice. Last fall, she published Woman Without Shame/Mujer sin vergüenza, her first book of poetry in 28 years, and was also awarded the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She is currently adapting her beloved bildungsroman, The House on Mango Street, into an opera with composer Derek Bermel. From the sanctuary of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Cisneros has lived for the last 10 years, the poet shares a sound bite from a brewing storm.