As if it were a jump shot from their basketball-obsessed childhood, “soaring towards the rim like a kite,” Andrea Gibson could send a spoken word poem spinning through space and time knowing it would reach its perfect home — swishing to a close in the last lines, nothing but net.

A master of spoken-word performance, Gibson insisted that poetry, especially when read aloud to an audience, was a political act.

Readers and fans of Andrea Gibson’s work offered an outpouring of love, grief and touching tributes Monday about how the poet’s words found them at just the right time.