I’ve always loved the poem "Year's End" by Richard Wilbur, and it is of course a great choice for the last day of the year, so here’s a short episode on this amazing poem. Wishing you all a wonderful New Year's Eve, and a great year to come!

Richard Wilbur, twice-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was the author of eleven collections of poetry, and was also the second Poet Laureate of the United States. 

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In time for your holiday travels, here is a new episode to cue up! Today, Abbie Kiefer talks about her new book, Certain Shelter, which focuses on the loss of her mother and the loss of her home, a Maine mill town. We also talk about the poet, E.A. Robinson. Happy Thanksgiving!

Besides Certain Shelter, Kiefer is the author of the chapbook Brief Histories. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other places. She is on the staff of The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire.

Pick up a copy of Certain Shelter here.

Read more about Abbie Kiefer.

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Today on the show is Carl Phillips, whose new book, Scattered Snows, to the North, has recently been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Carcanet in the UK, where it has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Phillips' previous book, Then the War and Selected Poems, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In total, Phillips has published 17 books of poetry and three prose volumes. His work has earned him many awards and accolades besides the Pulitzer, including the 2021 Jackson Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Award.

Pick up a copy of Scattered Snows, to the North here. (Want the British version? Here you go.)

Read more about Carl Phillips.

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Today's guest is Matthew Buckley Smith, whose new book, Midlife, won the 2021 Richard Wilbur Poetry Award, and is out from Measure Press. He is also the author of Dirge for an Imaginary World, which won the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. His poems and stories have appeared in AGNI, American Life in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Subtropics, and Threepenny Review. 

He also hosts a terrific podcast of his own—Sleerickets—a podcast about “poetry and other intractable problems” as he calls it. It’s a smart and in-depth look at poetry and the poetry world and is absolutely worth giving a listen to. 

Pick up a copy of Midlife here.

Read more about Matthew Buckley Smith.

Listen to Sleerickets. (Also, subscribe to the Secret Show!)

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A new sidebar edition! This week I read and discuss Barbara Jordan's poem "The Discovery Room," from her book, Channel. Jordan only published two books of poems, and they are excellent. What happened to her, why she stopped writing, or publishing, is a bit of a mystery. Do you know Jordan's work? Do you have clues as to her whereabouts? I'd love to know. Send me a note, please!

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Today's show features poet Christian J. Collier, author of the new book of poems, Greater Ghost, hot off the press from Four Way Books. This is a book full of smart, tough, and beautiful poems. It was wonderful to be introduced to him and his work.

Christian Collier is the author Greater Ghost and the chapbook, The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors' Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.

Pick up a copy of Greater Ghost here and The Gleaming of the Blade here.

Read more about Christian J. Collier.

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Today on the show is Dan O'Brien, discussing his new book, Flying on Easter and Other Poems. This pamphlet was published by Poetry London Editions in the UK, and is drawn from his recent full-length collection from Acre Books, Survivor's Notebook.

O'Brien is the author of previous poetry collections, including Our Cancers, New Life, War Reporter, and the nonfiction books From Scarsdale: A Childhood and A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas. He is an accomplished playwright as well, having won several awards for his plays The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage and The Body of an American, which also earned him a 2015-16 Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama & Performance Art.

A content note about today's show: it does feature a mention of suicide, so please use discretion.

Pick up a copy of Flying on Easter here and Survivor’s Notebook here.

Read more about Dan O’Brien.

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Today on the show is poet Callie Siskel, discussing her new book, Two Minds. It's a terrific book, one that is, in part, about her father, the late, wonderful film critic Gene Siskel. Two Minds is Siskel's first full-length book, after her Poetry Society of America chapbook, Arctic Revival, which was selected for publication by Elizabeth Alexander.

Siskel's poetry appears in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Pick up a copy of Two Minds here.

Read more about Callie Siskel.

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On the show this week is Kevin Prufer, author of the new book of poems, The Fears, which just won the Rilke Prize, as well as the new novel, Sleepaway. Prufer is the author of several previous collections of poems, including The Art of Fiction, Churches, and National Anthem. With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers. Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.

Pick up a copy of The Fears here and Sleepaway here.

Read more about Kevin Prufer.

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Today's show features poet Philip Metres discussing his new book, Fugitive/Refuge, published in April by Copper Canyon Press.

Philip Metres is the author of twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge, Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, Sand Opera, and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky. His work—poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Watson Foundation. He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio.

Pick up a copy of Fugitive/Refuge here.

Read more about Philip Metres.

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