Early Reads

Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

The queens revisit some early, inspiring books of poetry that still slap! Come nerd out with us.
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Buy our books:
Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.
Read Linda Gregg's "Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live"
Read an interview with Wayne Koestenbaum, "Dirty Mind: An Interview with WK" which appeared in LA Review of Books
Read "Boy at the Patterson Falls" from Toi Derricotte's Captivity.
Listen to Susan Mitchell read "A Rainbow" -- the fun starts around 11:08. It includes her singing in German….
Read Cathy Song's "Ikebana" from Picture Bride, which won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets and was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Listen to Cornelius Eady read some poems from Brutal Imagination (including "How I Got Born") and talk about Susan Smith here (forward to 23:50 mark). You can read the text of "How I Got Born" here (scroll down and click title to expand the whole poem). Eady turned the poems into a play of the same name; you can listen to Eady in conversation with Joe Morton about that process here (~47 min).