In the opening poem of Rachel Edelman’s debut collection, Dear Memphis, the speaker returns to their home city after a long time away, traversing a landscape that is both familiar and foreign, a place to which she belongs but also doesn’t. Over the course of the collection, Edelman asks questions about heritage and inheritance; about exile, diaspora, and migration; about home; about marginalization and privilege, oppression and complicity. In our conversation, we talked about acts of care, the importance of self-criticality, what poems do, and the necessary and the possible. Then for the second segment, we talked about corresponding via hand-written letters.

(Recorded June 28, 2024)

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Show Notes:

• Rachel Edelman
• Purchase Dear Memphis: Open Books (Seattle, WA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Jacob Lawrence - The Migration Series
• Morgan Parker - Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night
• Alan Kurdi (The boy on the beach)
• emet ezell
• Rachel Edelman & emet ezell - “The Correspondent’s Cheeks Are as a Bed of Spices”
• James Merrill - “Lost in Translation”
• AGNI 99

Transcript Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo