I have been circling for thousands of years
and still I don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
~Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Joanna Macy)
While completing a ninth-grade English project, my mother and I exchanged two poems; she gave me “The Man-moth” by Elizabeth Bishop and I gave her “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman. We talked about them for hours. It felt like discovering a new and mysterious door in our house.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and its void of intimacy, my appetite for poetry—not just reading, but appreciating, writing, and workshopping—became insatiable.
Since then, I have published more than 70 poems, including with the likes of the Columbia Journal, PINCH Journal, Nimrod International Journal, New Ohio Review, and the Sonora Review. I was named a 2022 Fellow for the “WritingXWriters Workshop” and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. My first chapbook Character Flaws, about the intersection of self-judgment and judgment of others in romantic and sexual relationships, won the Spring 2023 award for publication with Fauxmoir lit. I’m currently working on my first full-length collection about parent-child conflict, healing, and abiding love.
Lastly, I co-host The Chickadee Collective, an intimate group of poets living on Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and Massachusett land (greater Boston area) dedicated to fostering poetic craft. We believe community is not only essential to appreciating poetry but also helps us to shepherd, doula, shape our art into its most potent, magical form.
Eben E. B. Bein 