Wooden bookcases line the warm red walls, each shelf brimming with poetry books—yellow-tinted pages lovingly dog-eared at the corners. Hanging from the ceiling, musicians and writers fill a black-and-white...

Poet Neeli Cherkovski recounts afternoons of picking lemons from a lemon tree in his home garden and listening to his little dog yapping at squirrels on his redwood deck in the distance. As hummingbirds...