In this article, we explore how the reading and writing of poetry can be a form of critical hope within secondary English teacher education courses, and across our experiences as English teachers. We begin by discussing a particular moment from our secondary English teacher education course, where one of our teacher interns prompted us to respond thoughtfully about the ways we have enacted critical hope by asking, "How do I teach with hope?" From this moment, we share five vignettes of how as former teachers and current teacher educators, we each read and taught with poetry and the ways these moments evoked possibilities for how we might trace the contours of critical hope through a deeper engagement of the relational and poetic within teaching.