23 Books We Are Looking Forward to This Spring

Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call

“my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen, but it's one thing to know and another thing to understand.”

Alan, murder, me, what the hell was Alan thinking? From serial productions and the New York Times, I'm Em Gesson and this is the idiot. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the Book Review from the New York Times. We've all made it somehow to April.

We've had our snowstorms, we've survived the cold, and now that the days are getting longer, it feels like there's more time to read. I'm certainly staying up later with the Sun Out longer. So this week on the Book Review, we've got you covered. We are going to be talking about a few books coming out in the next couple of months that

we are particularly excited about.

Plus, we're going to hear from former poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Lamone. She is out with a new book where she makes the case for poetry. It is National Poetry Month.

“That is later in the show, but now, Shimana, Shimana, is here to talk about spring books.”

Hello, Shimana. Hi, Gilbert. We are going to talk about spring books here. We're going to talk about books that are coming out in April and May, because in a couple months, we are going to have a grand summer book preview episode.

Do we have books to tie this over until summer? We do.

Although, I want our prophecies by saying that this is a weird season, this particular spring

is kind of weird for books. Why is it? I'm going to talk about more nonfiction than I typically do on these episodes, which, you know, it's good. I'm, I'm growing.

Yeah, that's what spring is for.

“Well, tell us about the first book that you're excited about.”

Okay, so this one is an novel. Although, it's kind of debatable, but it is a work of fiction. We'll start there. So this is transcription by Ben Lerner. Ben is the author of leaving the Atotestation, the Tepeka School, Teno 4.

He's very brainy and intellectual. He's also a really great poet and critic. So his work tends to be very sort of ideas driven and, and the language is very beautiful. And this is a very different kind of novel than what he's written before. This one is a lot looser.

It's more like a sort of miasma of writing than like a book that's motivated by plot. But the framework is this. So there's a middle-aged writer who's going back to Providence to interview his mentor with whom he studied in college. So he gets to Providence.

He settles into the hotel. He's like face timing his young daughter and he drops the phone and the sink. The night before he's about to do this big interview. And of course, he was planning on using like voice notes to record the discussion. And he's like, OK, well, now I have no backup recording device.

I don't even know how to get to an Apple store because I don't have a working phone. So this is just sort of like a total anxiety spiral. Anyway, he gets to his mentor's house. He sort of fakes it. He's like, yeah, I'm definitely recording our interview, even though he's not.

And his mentor is this like 90 something like German academic who, like multi-highfinite who's talking about art and raising children and historiography. And it's a pretty beautiful exchange between the narrator making contact with his young herself and remembering what it was like to study with this man versus the man himself now who sort of has this like wizard.

He feels almost like ancient and timeless the way he talks. You know what, what excites me about this book. Do you know what I'm going to say? Gosh, don't don't say it, don't say it. It is, it is such a short book.

It's so slim, but you can barely notice it if you put it on a shelf. It's like it's not even there. No, and you know how beautiful is that, actually slim, but mighty. It really does pack a punch and like I found it very satisfying. It's debatable whether it's a novel, but it is a very compelling piece of fiction.

So that is transcription by Ben Learner and that is coming out on April 7th. Gilbert, what do you have? I have a book by Tom Prada, who I feel is someone who's books are pretty beloved. He is the guy behind election, little children, the leftovers, these are all great books

He is a New Jersey writer.

He is writing sort of a story that is set back when he was a kid. Ghost town is the name of his latest novel, and this is about a New Jersey writer who is remembering, you know, 50 years ago when he was 13 years old, it's the summer of 1973 or 1974, and there's unfortunately been a death in the family, and he has just become a teenager. He's at loose ends, he has a note to do with these feelings that he has, and he takes

up with a couple of older kids. One of them is, you know, an older boy who is kind of a near-duel, there's another older girl that he's starting to hang it out with, who tries to contact the spirit of his deceased relative with a Ouija board. Who among us?

Who? Hey. Did you? Oh yeah. Ouija boards.

Yes. I was ready to put my faith in things sold to me by Hasbro. There was nothing in my household that was more banned than a Ouija board.

“Oh, was it, too, was it, too, like, a cult adjacent?”

Yes. My mother is like, to do not bring one of those into the house, do not use it, you're going to bring the devil into our lives. So I've actually, I don't think I've ever used a Ouija board. Oh, my God.

And now. What are you going to do? It's been too many decades. I can't do. What if your kid wants one?

Would you let your kid bring one into your house? Absolutely not. Well. I have a man of reason to die. We can only be like that.

And I still would never let a Ouija board into my house.

So, you know, there's a Ouija board in the story. Tom Prada is someone who doesn't write stories that have sort of like supernatural unrealistic undertones. He's generally really good at writing about situations that are sort of part comedic, part realistic, writes about schools, he writes about marriages.

He writes about parenthood, you know, these things that many of us can relate to. And he is in reflecting mode.

“It's sort of like, you know, the standby, you've, have you seen stand by me?”

That movie. It's sort of like that framing and older writer of members and important summer in his younger years. So that is ghost town by Tom Prada and that is out April 28th. Shimana, I know you are uncharacteristically excited to talk about nonfiction.

So tell me. Yeah, I am, actually, this is, okay, so one of the books that I'm particularly excited

about for April is by one of my favorite, never miss bylines in terms of like international

reporting. This is from life itself by Susie Hansen. I think she is just like an all-star international correspondent. She's been based in Turkey for, I think, over a decade at this point. And her last book, notes on a foreign country was a Pulitzer finalist.

She writes for the New York Times magazine sometime. And she's just like the level of analysis and reporting chops is like aspirational. I remember this is a kind of writing that used to make me want to be a journalist. So this book is really the story of Erdogan's Turkey through one working class neighborhood in Istanbul.

And this is not necessarily a totally new narrative of Turkey under Erdogan. She does make a lot of comparisons about his grabs of power and increasing authoritarianism in the country under his tenure. She's very elegant in drawing the parallels between life and Turkey under this. As she says, "canny, cruel, autocratic leader and other countries."

These are really heavy ideas and her book is so grounded in people and life that it actually makes what could otherwise be a very abstract, cultural or political analysis feel very real and very relatable.

“And I think that that is the best kind of journalism.”

I don't know why I'm feeling so proud of our profession right now. I love it. You should be proud. I know. I just, I'm such a sucker for this stuff.

It's so important to have access to other lives. That's why we read. Okay, anyway. I'm not even tearing up. Or do you just have something that you're eye?

Unclear, even to more. Okay. That is from life itself by Susie Hansen and that is coming out on April 28th. Okay. I'm going to talk about another piece of nonfiction.

This is a book called "This Land is Your Land," a road trip through US history. This one is by Beverly Gage.

a book called "Gee Man," this was a book about Jay Edgar Hoover.

She's a historian at Yale and it won the Pulitzer Prize for a biography a few years ago. So she has a new book and as the subtitle indicates, it's structured around a series of road trips.

“Do you know that this year is the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States?”

Did you know that? The semi-quince and tunnel? Yes. The United States? Yes.

That is what it is called. That's right. It's the semi-quince and tunnel. And so this book is perfectly time. There's a lot of books about American history coming up in the next six months.

She goes to various sort of places and historical sites across this country to write about history, but to also write about how places and historical sites can tell us about history. You know, she goes to Philadelphia and to Founder's Hall. She has to Washington's Virginia, the Alamo or Sumter for a chapter on the Civil War, Montgomery

“for the Civil Rights Movement, and I believe she ends up at Disneyland, which is, as we--”

As American as a guest. As we both know, the apotheosis of all things American. I love road trips, and I'm really into this one. I feel like I'm firmly in my middle-aged dad mode, reading about history, taking road trips, taking the family out.

It's very possible that this would be a good book to listen to while driving-- While driving-- While driving across the country. Rather, meta, indeed. This land is yearland by Beverly Gage, that book is about April 7th.

I have another work in non-fiction. Actually, I think it might be that every other book I discussed on this episode is non-fiction,

which has never happened to me before us.

We forgive you. Wasn't asking. No, did. So this title is just catnip for me. This is called Prophecy. Oh, here we go.

"Perniction, power, and the fight for the future from ancient oracles to AI by Karissa Villies."

“And I think this is a brilliant conceit for a book.”

So basically, Villies, she's a sort of philosopher at The Cist at Oxford, she makes the point that the world we live in now, which is increasingly governed by algorithms, is really not all that different from ancient Greece, and the priestesses at Delphi making predictions and prophecies and staring into Orbs. And this delights me to no end, because I do think that people write off foretelling

prophecies, predictions, as sort of like pseudoscience. You know, I'm both fascinated at befuddled by your interest in astrology and all things related. Hit me. Yeah, what is the appeal here?

You know, one of the things that was really astonishing to me reading this book is that she makes the point, everything from like, whether you get a proof for a mortgage to like the people you see served up on dating apps, there's so much of our life that is dictated with like variable amounts of like significance, you know, like a mortgage, health care, things like that by these algorithms that we think are somehow like more rational or more

reliable than human intelligence, and that might actually just not be the case. That might actually just be an expression of our desire to try to like control the future, like AI is really no different than these old Greek ladies. I'm curious. I'm not convinced, but I'm curious.

Well, you know, I, I also would like to make sense of my life. Did you ever go to Zoltan when you were growing up in New York? Hell yeah. Okay. Let's see.

I'm the boardwalker I play land. Thank you. Yeah. All right, so that's all I need to do here. So this book is prophecy, prediction, power, and the fight for the future from ancient

oracles to AI by Chris Availies, and that is coming out on April 21st. I am going to take us back to the world of fiction very briefly to talk about a book called The Witch by the French author, Marie Enzae, translated by Jordan Stump. This particular one, it is a book that was published in France in 1996. So it's just making its way to the States here.

It was recently long listed for the International Booker Prize, and that is the booker Prize that is focused on translated fiction. This is a book about a suburban housewife who in the world of this book has magical powers, but they're very mild, magical powers. She can sort of tell the near future without any algorithms.

But she has two daughters who she finds are much more magically powerful than her, much more

This is really a book about people, about motherhood, about marriage, about being a parent, about trying to figure out what to do when your kids are looking to believe in us, get out of the house. They're proven that they're more impressive than you are, which is maybe something that you have feared your whole life, I'm not speaking from experience.

So it has all these sort of like real human concerns with a little soups-all of magic. You know what I love about this episode? No one could have predicted the total role reversal about we are playing. Yeah. Not even Zoltah.

Not even Zoltah. Listen.

“Between the two of us, who is far more likely to say soups-all?”

You? Muah. Yeah. And I'm just happy to hear you talk about the witchier side of life. Welcome.

Welcome. We've been waiting for you.

I was always going to write there, perhaps.

So that is the witch by Marie and Zai and that is out April 7th. Shimada, we're going to take a break. So coming up, we're going to have more books to look out for this spring. I'm Robin, and I am excited to open my crossplay app. I'm challenging John.

My colleague at the New York Times. Robin played the word "grunge," which has a G, which is four points. She got that triple word multiplier. I'm going to take facts and make it facts as for 30 points. I might just take another two-letter word here with Woe, gets me at 23.

“I think this will put me back in the lead if my maths are mapping.”

I like to play it more from Mr. J.J. at the point of view, and see where I can block the other player from scoring high. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and co-workers, and also get to learn new words.

Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times games.

Download it for free today. I think he thinks he has this in the bag, but I'm not so sure. All right, Gilbert, I'm waiting with Bated Breath. What else is there? We have one more book at April.

They were going to talk about it. Of course, there are many more books coming out in April, but we don't have all day here. This is London Falling, by Patrick Reddenke, have you ever heard of this gentleman? You have. He is a reporter for the New Yorker. You and I and many people probably know him best for his book, St. Nothing.

This is a book that came out in 2018.

“Certainly for journalists and people that love narrative nonfiction, it is one of the”

greats on our list of 100 best books of the 21st century, it came at number 19. And he is just undefeated in getting me to read books about things that I did not think I'd be interested about. I picked it up mostly out of curiosity, I thought I would bounce from it in a couple chapters and Shimana, I did not.

What a book. It's so grip. He's an amazing writer. You know one of my favorite books by him is the Snakehead. That's the one I have it read.

Yeah, he's like another must read for me. He is. This is an expansion of a PC wrote for the New Yorker about the death of a young man in 2019 in London. This was an English kid who is pretending to be the son of a Russian old guy.

He fell in with the wrong crowd and then one night he falls from the balcony of a very fancy apartment building right on the banks of the tens. So it starts as this true crime story and then it really just expands out in every couple chapters, introduces a new sort of like social layer to the whole story. So you learn about this kid and his family and the fact that he was the grandson of a famous

Jewish rabbi in London. You learn about the tragedy of his death and you learn about the people that he got mixed up with the Russian oligarch scene in London and the gangster scene in London and it expands

out to talk about crime and it's just it's incredible.

It's really good and it's also about parenthood and grief. I found myself actually sort of like very very taken and distraught at various points in this book as that's gripping as anything else but you're also with this family who's sort of grieving the death of their child and learning so many things about him that they did not know it's it's it's just really good and luckily for all of us we're gonna have

Patrick Renky fun the book review podcast next week look at that look at that look at that that is London falling by Patrick Renky that is out April 7th. I think we have to move to mate. All right. I'm gonna take the guesswork out of this for you and I'm going to tell you I have a

very big large novel that I'm going to talk about it's so big it's so big it's so big and you know I happen to like that but your mileage may vary so this is the calamity club by Katherine Stockett it's been a long time since we've had a book by

south for this one but it's a very different kind of book and a very different scope

“and she's grown a lot as a writer I think so this one is set in 1930s Mississippi and it”

really has two main story lines that actually do converge pretty beautifully so the

first one is Meg who is this incredibly intelligent and and plucky and I hate this word

resilient but she is the definition of resilient orphan and Meg is really trying to keep open life that her mom is going to come back despite everything and this is like a horrendous environment she's bullied by like the orphanage director and I mean it's it's really quite harrowing very Tennessee Williams okay but we love Meg we do and then down in the Mississippi Delta we meet Birdie who is this 20 something woman she lives with her mother and her

Mima and they're having some pretty dire financial problems and they are so desperate I mean like Birdie works she's a bookkeeper she's earning but like things are just not like the math isn't math thing and no matter how much creative accounting she's trying to do it's they're in dire streets so her younger sister actually had gone up to Oxford and married a banker

and then basically ghosted her family so Birdie goes up on the train to go beg her younger sister

for money and then that really sets in motion like the whole book because Birdie starts volunteering at the orphanage where Meg is Meg's life changes, Birdie's life changes, this was a book that I missed

“when I was not reading it, right I think I read like 700 pages in a day and a half.”

You said it was helping? I'm not going back to that and I texted a colleague of ours who had recommended it to me and I was like do I like plot now like there's so much that happens in this book that I was like oh my god like I used to think that I liked only like amorphous books with no structure but now I think I might like things happening in books so this is a

sprawling messy plot driven yeah like very memorable characters and there's a lot of information

and and she does a lot to build out her universe so that's the calamity club by Katherine Stockett and it is coming out on May 5th. Okay I have a piece of fiction I think a ton of people are going to read this spring because it is sort of like a sequel not sequel to a giant book that came up a few years ago. That book was called the Midnight Library that was by Matt Hague and this book which is out at the end of May is called Midnight Train so they're related

somewhat they're sort of set in the same Midnight universe but they're not direct sequel to each other so Midnight Library did you ever read that one? I did. All right so that one was about a middle-aged woman she finds herself as it happens to some of us in a magical library and each book in that library takes you into a different version of your life so this book is a little different it's about an older man he is at the end of his life he actually dies which is not a

spoiler he dies before however he gets to whatever his version of the afterlife is he gets on a train

“and that train allows him to relive moments from his past would you ever relive moments from your past?”

Oh my god no like no. Okay I think there are many people in their life who who would like to. Are there episodes of your life you would like to revisit? No I that seems dangerous seems like why would you why would you every moment that we have lived has led us to this point and that is where we are and it is where we are supposed to be and I'm totally fine with it. Namaste. Namaste. You know need a Ouija board. This is midnight train by Matt Hague that is out May 26. I predict that

there are some people who are going to find this a little too sugar sweet but given how popular the midnight library was I can see this on the bestseller list all through the summer. Okay I have something that is not sugar sweet and I have something that is all about revisiting past episodes of your life are you leave the most dark and harrowing episodes of your life. This is a memoir called well I say memoir. It's a work-and-on fiction. Let's

let's not split here. It's called Dog Days by Emily LeBarge and the story behind this book is rather harrowing so we should get that out of the way up front. She and her family were on vacation in an island and around Canada tiny little cottage somewhere and held hostage at gunpoint

and art writer and I think that's important for the eventual structure of this book so the book

opens with her at her family osteopath. God love Canada man like I like everybody needs an osteopath

“this I believe okay and he's like Emily why don't you get down in the position you were”

during the hostage situation and she was like no I don't want to do that but what ends up happening is that she really talks about how for the last 15 years she's been sitting with like how do I tell the like good story of what happened to me the short version that doesn't make anyone too uncomfortable and I think one of the things that I really appreciated about this book it's not modeling it's not self-deprecating it really like entirely side steps to sort of like trauma economy

we see in a lot of cultural material right now it's really smart and I think because she is like made a career as a critic looking at why art works or why people decide to express themselves in a certain way she's able to really grapple with like how we talk about traumatic events or how we talk about episodes in our own history or how we even like make sense of our own lives I think it's really really smart I think this is just a book that really should not be skipped if you ask me

and that is dog days by Emily LeBarge coming out on May 19th I have one more book that I want to talk about this is the land and it's people and it is by David Sedaris one of the most famous elf what the most well known writers of essays in America there's an essay in here and of course

“about his boyfriend you don't even need to say his name no that's why I'm here for about”

he's boyfriend he has to have hip surgery and David writes about that very willingly you know he writes about friendship as you age loss as you age he has had a generation of people sort of grow up with him as they've read his essays over time and this is just going to feel right for a big portion of his audience so that is the land and it's people by David Sedaris that is out on May 26th in Shimana there's so many books we can't talk about them all but what we wanted to

do I think we should do a lightning round yeah and what we're going to do is mention a few more titles that are coming out in April and May title author maybe a one-line summary if that of the book so you know it used to be easier to flip a coin when we actually carried coins do we want to flip this water bottle top yeah we can see who are you tougher bottom bottom Shimana okay so on the calculation of volume book four by Solve Bala this is this sort of runaway hit

that's like groundhog day but more existential this actually has quite a bit of plot so if you've been reading along up until now like you can really strap in for something exciting to happen on November 18th and as a fun little bit book five is coming out later this year in November I think they're translating them as fast as they come out I I really like those books yeah I do too I'm going to mention fame sick this is a memoir by Lina Dunham I think we all know who Lina Dunham is I believe that

the show girls is a very good show never seen it okay I have another celebrity adjacent memoir this

is the same one by Anna Conkel she is a co-creator in co-star of pen 15 this is about her dad who was a manager at 7-11 and I am just hooked by that alone. Shimana I woke up this morning after having

“had several dreams about our hundred best books of the 21st century and I remember that Jesman Ward”

the author Jesman Ward had three books on that list incredibly impressive she has a new book out this spring it is called unwitness and despair this is a collection of essays the name of that book is not unwitness and repair which I thought it had been for several months it is unwitness and despair everybody's running to the dictionary I have John of John by Douglas Stewart you might recognize that name because he is also the booker prize winning author of Shuggie Bane.

I am going to mention the things we never say this is the latest by Elizabeth Strout. Strout is a very

prolific author you probably know her best for Olive Kidderidge which won the Pulitzer Prize many years

I'm going to talk about yesterday year by Caro Clare Burke this is a sort of head trip of a book

“of jazz. It sounds interesting yeah yeah it's about this tradwife influencer who is like home”

studying and she wakes up one day and her historic farmhouse that she lives in that's also her content studio where she raises her like 12 kids she wakes up and it's 1805. I can't wait to read that one. Yeah it sounds like or it's a really good concept. So there is an episode of the Sim Sim's Treehouse of Horror and there's a joke in which the last book on earth is a book called Arsignio a memoir by the former late night host Arsignio Hall and now 15 years later. How many things

has the Sim Sim's predicted? 15 years later so they're actually now is a memoir by Arsignio

Hall called Arsignio. I love it. I love this one this this is okay so five weeks in the country by Francine Pros historical novel based on the real life friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Anderson. They were tight. They were buds huh yeah who knew? I'm going to mention a book called The Ending Rights itself so this is a thriller written under the pen name Evelyn Clark and two writers came together to write this one V. E. Schwab who's are very well-known

genre author and cat park. Maria Temple who is best known as the author of Where'd you go Bernadette has a new novel coming out called Go Gentle. Patricia Cornwell is a very well-known mystery writer. She has written a bunch of novels starring Cace Carpeita who is sort of her her star character. She's a forensic pathologist. They actually just made a series starring the Cole Kidman that just came out. Patricia Cornwell has a memoir about her life in her early career

and that is called True Crime. Shimana that was so many books. So many.

As always thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. Mixing it up here with me.

Nonfiction. I don't even know who I'm going to leave this studio a change person. This is your nonfiction here. After the break, former poet laureate Aida Lamon. Truth be told anytime I begin to write anything these days, my whole life flashes before my eyes. Do I want to break something? Or do I want to mend something? Or simply try to carve out a small

place to breathe? Then if I'm lucky, lines of poems I love start to move through me. Last May, Aida Lamon gave a speech at the Library of Congress. It was her closing lecture, her final talk as the 24th United States poet laureate. And in that speech,

“she made a case for why poetry matters. Would it be an exaggeration to say that poetry saves lives?”

Maybe. Maybe not. During my tenure as the poet laureate, I've come to realize that not only are people hungry for poetry, language and connection, but that for so many people around the world, it serves as a much needed lifeline already. That speech has now been published as a book titled Against Breaking on the Power of Poetry. Given that April is National Poetry Month, we had to have Aida on to talk about her speech as

well, hopefully as to read a poem. Aida, welcome to the book review. Thank you so much for having me. Aida, I'm going to ask your question that I hope you do not take a fence at the beginning here because you write about it in your book. And it has to do with the fact that I don't think many Americans know what the poet laureate is. What did you think this honor involved? And what did you learn in the doing about what the poet laureate actually

has to do? Yes, a poet laureate is a position named by the librarian of Congress. And you're asked to promote poetry and the library and put poetry in the public sphere.

“But really, the role is whatever you make it. I think that's why each poet laureate like”

Joy Harjo, Tracy Kiesmith, one-filipe Aida, everyone has done such a different job because there is really only two obligations. The one is to do an opening reading at the Library of Congress and a closing lecture at the Library of Congress. You just named the three people who

them and say, "Hey guys, I don't know what to do here. Can you give me some advice?" I did. I did.

“Specifically to Tracy and to Joy. Joy specifically told me to”

clear any ideas I had about the laureate ship and really make it my own. And Tracy said,

"Always speak through poetry." That when you feel lost, find poems and write poems.

And that was really also amazing advice. What did you learn about how poetry is regarded or perceived in America over your years as the poet laureate? We're here. It's national poetry month. It's wonderful that it gets a whole month in which we can try to focus a little more on it. But you went across this large land of ours and encountered people all the time and your job was to be sort of the avatar for poetry.

“Did you come away feeling or optimistic about it? Did you come away feeling like the scales”

had been ripped from your eyes in some way to tell me about this? It's funny because every study I see

says that we're reading less as a nation and that poetry readership is down. But my experience in the wild, if you will, is that people are reading poetry and writing poetry everywhere. Everywhere I went, someone was doing a project. Someone was teaching kids to write poems and putting them on rocks and putting them around trees. Someone was having people take pictures and write poems towards the pictures. There were so many collaborations that I felt really inspired

and my job seemed to switch from being someone who was supposed to be out there making a case for poetry. Instead, I had this moment where I got to receive what people's experience with poetry was and it was very deep. There was a paragraph from your

“speech from this book. Do you mind if I read it back to you and just to get some further thoughts on it?”

You said and then you wrote in this book and there are certainly days that I do not want to write a poem. Why is that because there are days when I don't want to feel? Or rather, I only want to feel safe and soft things. Poetry does the work of opening us up to our feelings and it's not surprising that it can often make people cry, even those of us who very much wish, not to cry. It's my belief. This is part I found very interesting. That this is why adults often think poetry is for children.

Not because they wanted to be taught to children, but because they think that children have more of an emotional range. This is exactly why poetry needs to be more integrated into the lives of adults. There are like five different things to ask about here. But I was particularly interested in why you think adults associate or some adults, associate poetry more of a children when as you were just describing, it really can

encompass the full range of adult emotion in ways that other forms maybe can't.

You know, I love that you read that passage because, first of all, I'm glad it still rings

true to me. But the moment that I was named the poet laureate, the first thing that people asking was, "Oh, so are you going to work with children?" And every time I talk about poetry, there is for people who are unfamiliar with poetry, the first thing they ask is about whether or not it's poetry for kids. And I realized it was a way of distancing themselves from poetry and it made me wonder if perhaps we feel as if as adults we aren't allowed to access

all of our emotions that that kind of vulnerability or rawness or the full spectrum of human emotions, which are a lot. We're not supposed to access that. We're not supposed to delve into that.

and we're supposed to get our job done, right? We're supposed to go to work and keep us

smiling our face and when someone asks us how we are, we're supposed to say fine. You just described my morning. Whereas if you ask a kid, yeah exactly, and if you ask a kid, they'll say, "Well, this is the way I'm feeling or you know." And so we sort of train that out of us

“and I think that's why I was so adamant that a lot of the work I wanted to do was of course”

included children, but that it was primarily four adults. I'm curious, how much of what you just

described do you think is this sort of social training and how much of it is, I don't know,

maybe some inherent like human desire not to let it engage with emotion, more than you need to. Yeah, I had a friend who once said, he was going through a hard time, and he said, "I can't even listen to music right now because every time a song comes on, I burst into tears." And I really relate to that. And so I think there are times where art, we know what it does. It is supposed to open us. It's supposed to pierce us, right?

So sometimes there's places where we feel at least for me, at least in my reality. I know there are times when I don't want to read a poem because

I know that it will make me weep. I can see the first line, you know, and it's like driving

towards something. You think, "No, no, no, I don't want to feel that right now." And I think

“there's a great permission to do that, but also remember that sometimes that breaking open”

in that feeling and that grieving or that openness to wonder or joy, that's really important. And we don't heal and we don't continue if we don't grieve. And a lot of times, the poems that hurt us are the poems that actually give us joy. Remind us of joy. Remind us of sweet things. Because that can pierce us too. I remember when I was grieving this death of my stepmother and the jelly when I lived in New York, the jelly downstairs. There was a wonderful

couple that worked there. And I walked in and this woman, she was so nice. And she just said, "How are you? I haven't seen you in a while and I'd been home." The home death and so I'd been home helping my stepmother die. And the sweetness of this woman behind the counter just destroyed me. I had gone to work. I had ridden the subway, I kept it together and then this kindness, you know,

“human kindness just wrecked me. And I think poetry is a lot like that interaction where sometimes”

it just gives you permission to take a deep breath and you'd be surprised at how many of us are walking around holding our breath. Well, Ada, I am going to give you permission to take a deep breath. And hopefully you're going to give us all permission to take a deep breath by reading a poem. It'd be so happy, too. This is a poem that I feel like it was given to me by a tree. And every time I say that out loud, I think, "Oh, this is what people think poets say."

I just thought the same thing. Like, oh, a tree gave me this poem. You know, I can just hear collective eye rolling. And this is who we are. So, you know, we're here to stay. Instructions are not giving up. More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crab apple tree. More than the neighbors almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains. It's the greening of the trees that really

gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's bubbles and trinkets leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come, patient, plotting, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us. A return to the strange idea of continuous living. Despite the

unfurling like a fist to an open palm. I'll take it all.

“You know, I'm very in comfort with the with the feelings of feeling. You're just going to have to”

take it all. You're just going to have to feel it. My friend. This is not what I said before. Can I ask you possibly to read another one? Yeah, I'd be so happy to. Thank you. How do you

want to feel? I'm putting my heart in your hands here so you choose. This is a poem that I wrote

thinking about language and poetry. I wanted to give it a really obnoxious title, so I called it literary theory. You succeeded. Literary theory. Somehow the word "allow" is in the word "swallow" and in "swallow" to holy different meanings. One, to take in through the mouth and another what we call the common winged Nat Hunter who is in all probability somewhere near us now. Once I thought, if I knew all the words, I would say the right thing in the right way. Instead, language becomes

more brutish, blink twice for the bird, blink once for tender annihilation. Who knows what we are

“doing as we go about our days lazily choosing our languages. Some days, my life is held together”

by definitions. Some days, I read the word "swallow" and all my feathers show. Adela moan. Are you just used to like reading poems and seeing people in the audience like get theory I didn't stop? Yeah, and the worst is I'm on then I attend poetry readings all the time

and then I weep. So yeah, I love it. Boy, you have to stay hydrated. Oh, it's true. I'm always drinking

“one. I cry all the time. Am I super power is crying and laughing at the same time?”

This was great. Thank you very much for joining the book review. To remind us all of the joy and value of poetry. This has been at the light. Thank you so much for having me. The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Azado, original music by Dan Powell and Alicia By YouTube, special thanks to Dali Hadad and Paula Shuman. We want to hear what you think about the show. Send us an email at

[email protected]. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]