Drunk as a Poet on Payday

Today on the show is poet J.L. Conrad, whose new book, A World in Which, was released in April by Terrapin Books.

J.L. Conrad’s first full-length book is A Cartography of Birds (LSU Press), and she has published the chapbooks Recovery (2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize) and Not If But When (Salt Hill’s 2015 Dead Lake Chapbook Contest). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Jellyfish, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from American University and PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. And she lives in Madison still, that great capital city and land of delicious fried cheese curds, as well as a fantastic writing community.

Pick up a copy of A World in Which here.

Read more about J.L. Conrad.

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This week the show takes a twist: this is Drunk as a Poet on Payday: Sidebar Edition. Here I read and discuss Anthony Hecht's poem, "A Hill," from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Hard Hours. 

We'll return in two weeks with our regularly scheduled shows, featuring poet J.L. Conrad.

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Episode 3 is an auspicious meeting of astronomical event and poetry book, as today we feature Lisa Ampleman and her book Mom in Space on the day of the total solar eclipse across much of North America.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of three full-length poetry collections—Mom in Space, Romances, and Full Cry, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies—and the chapbookI’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You, winner of the Wick chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and in literary journals, including 32 Poems, Image, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and The Rumpus. Lisa is the recipient of scholarships and prizes from the Sewanee Writers Conference, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. Most recently, she was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY2022. She is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and the poetry series editor at Acre Books.

Read more about Lisa on her website.

Pick up a copy of Mom in Space.

And if you’re in the Cincinnati area, find her reading at the Cincinnati Observatory this April.

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Website: http://drunkasapoet.com

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Episode 2 features Jesse Nathan, whose first book, Eggtooth, was released last fall from Unbound Edition Press. One poem in the book, “Dame's Rocket,” was selected for the Best American Poetry 2024. The collection won the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry from the Great Lakes College Association.

Nathan’s poetry has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and the inaugural issue of Revel, among other magazines. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Stanford University, Bread Loaf, and the Kansas Arts Commission. He's a 2024 LABA Bay Area Fellow.

Nathan was a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. Nathan’s reviews and interviews appear in the online McSweeney’s series “Short Conversations with Poets.”

Find out more at Jesse Nathan’s website. Grab a copy of Eggtooth.

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In this premier episode, Jason Gray speaks with Cynthia Marie Hoffman, whose new book, Exploding Head, is a memoir-in-prose poems about her life as a young child and an adult with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world.

Hoffman is the author of three previous books of poetry, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Director’s Guest fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy. Her poems have appeared in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. 

Visit Cynthia Marie Hoffman's website or buy a copy of Exploding Head.

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