“I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best.
Scientists Create Plant That Produces Ayahuasca, Shrooms, and Toad Psychedelics All At Once 404 Media
Best Law Fiction for Law Students & Lawyers
Law Prep Tutorial in its Best Books for Law Students & Lawyers lists law books in fiction, nonfiction, and other genres. Here are the top 7 in fiction novels:
| 1 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| 2 | The Trial | Franz Kafka |
| 3 | The Firm | John Grisham |
| 4 | A Time to Kill | John Grisham |
| 5 | Bleak House | Charles Dickens |
| 6 | Presumed Innocent | Scott Turow |
| 7 | The Pelican Brief | John Grisham |
The mix is an interesting one indeed, with John Grisham writing three of the top seven. He is in fancy company, alongside Harper Lee, Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens, and Scott Turow.
What would your list
What can poetry give us in times of crisis?
At their best, poets both offer us an immersive break from clamorous news feeds and fortify us for the future
In her three years as Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2022 to 2025, Ada Limón travelled the length and breadth of her country. She found that communities everywhere made room for poetry in multiple ways, and her experiences inspired Against Breaking: On The Power of Poetry, out on April 7. Limón asks: “When so much is needed, desperately and urgently, in the world, how can one make an argument for poetry?” But people are hungry for poetry, language and connection, she suggests. It allows them to “recognize our own suffering and our own joy”.
Most forms of art can offer consolation and refuge but poets, at their best, give our attention a welcome and immersive break from clamorous news feeds.
The American poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who lives in Oxford, Mississippi, has just released a fresh collection titled Night Owl. These poems are an invitation to befriend and explore nocturnal life, to treat night as more than either a fearful place of shadows, or downtime:
My best friend has always been ink
and she lets me talk so much at night.
One of the marvels of my life —
an alphabet. A whole green and mossy
world can be made and remade
from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
My best friend has always been ink
and she lets me talk so much at night.
One of the marvels of my life —
an alphabet. A whole green and mossy
world can be made and remade
from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
In one of her poems, “How To Build a Moon Garden when the News Is All Horror”, Nezhukumatathil reminds us that gardens — like poetry — more than providing refuge or escape, can be spaces that bring us closer to life and remind us to be more present in the world as it is:
Turn off the hiss
and whirr from man-made lights and walk the night,
walk the grass, the fence line, let your boot crackle over
pebble and stick bits.
and whirr from man-made lights and walk the night,
walk the grass, the fence line, let your boot crackle over
pebble and stick bits.
Too often, escape is not possible. The Iranian poet Ali Asadollahi has advocated for the freedom of writers and editors who faced trials or imprisonment. Asadollahi is well-known in Iran for his six collections of poetry in Persian and for his work as an editor. His poetry has ranged from serious explorations of Iran’s history to more playful excursions into language, script and shape-poems. In early 2026, his translation from Farsi of his poem “I Used to Dream, I Used to be Safe” was published on the Modern Poetry in Translation website:
When the world is immersed in smoke,
give me a sign.
Remember me
somewhere beyond the mountains,
beyond the seas and burnt bodies.
give me a sign.
Remember me
somewhere beyond the mountains,
beyond the seas and burnt bodies.
In January, Asadollahi was detained in the mass protests and he remains incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin prison. PEN International recently reported that Asadollahi has been subjected to interrogation and could face further torture. As the lights go dark in many countries plunged into wars, and authoritarian winds cut like knives through once-thriving democracies like my own, it is up to readers to remember the ones who give words to our protests, prayers and anthems.
Other poets, like the Canadian Karen Solie, have found fresh ways to address the rapid shifts in the weather, the landscape and the discomfort we feel these days in an unpredictable environment. Solie teaches in Scotland, and rather than lament humanity’s destructiveness, she writes of climate change as an act of resistance on the part of the earth. One of my favourites from Wellwater, her 2025 TS Eliot Prize-winning collection, is “Smoke”, about summer fires in Fox Creek, Alberta:
Disabused of an illusion we say the fog has lifted,
the smoke has cleared, the dust
has settled, and now we see,
though what arises is not clarity
but a set of new misgivings. Is this how the world will be
and not just how it is?
the smoke has cleared, the dust
has settled, and now we see,
though what arises is not clarity
but a set of new misgivings. Is this how the world will be
and not just how it is?
We’re often given slightly sugary reasons why we keep returning to poetry, but Limón brings more clarity to our tendency to keep a favourite poet in our back pockets. “We may not have to have hope, but we have to have some curiosity. We have to have some resilience,” she said in a 2024 interview.
In “Startlement”, one of Limón’s recent poems, the narrator places us at a riverside, in companionship with other creatures, from a blue-bellied lizard to an unknown bird. “We were never at the circle’s center, instead/ all around us something is living or trying to live. / The world says, What we are becoming, we are / becoming together . . . ”
We live in uncertain times, but we can carry some lightness, some hard-won wisdom into the future.
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