Episode 78: Anne Boyer

Rachel Zucker speaks to poet Anne Boyer about The Undying, her recently published non-fiction book about having had highly-aggressive triple negative breast cancer. Boyer talks about a recent dream she had, the motivating fires of vengeance and love, and how to keep the door to hell open long enough to write one word at a time despite the disabling physical and emotional effects of cancer treatment. Zucker and Boyer discuss what happens when poets face the larger market, trusting readers, how to break out of the pressure to perform certain modes of self-expression, a feminist future where there can be more than one smart woman in a room, the pornography of authenticity, the relationship between poiesis and critique and why it’s important to resist the allure of criticism, resisting the pressure to create spectacles of suffering, how to find the least-alienating way to be inside alienating structures, the problem with pink-ribbon culture, the shortcomings of “empowerment feminism,” what real solidarity might look like, why Boyer loves to write but hates to publish and hates the work of being public, harassment and abuse in the literary world, and Tolstoy’s funeral.