Our lives are filled with distances, the physical spans that we travel but also the stranger, vaster expanses between our past and our present or between feeling anchored and connected and feeling terribly alone. A poem can capture all of those in a way that a map can’t, as Elisa Gonzalez superbly demonstrates in “To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self.”

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University MFA program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut poetry collection is Grand Tour (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023).

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Elisa Gonzalez’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

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