Perry Janes’s debut poetry collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, follows its speaker from childhood in Detroit to young adulthood in Los Angeles, a coming-of-age story in five acts, told through a series of lyric moments. The poems in this collection confront childhood sexual abuse and the story of what it means to be a man, ultimately reaching toward healing and love. In our conversation we talked about what poetry and prose do differently, how masculinity is presented in these poems, and why it was important to both include trauma but not dwell in it. For the second segment, we talked about attention and how hard it can be to focus.

(Recorded November 12, 2024)

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Show Notes:

• Perry Janes
• Purchase Find Me When You’re Ready: Book Soup (Los Angeles, CA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Natalie Eilbert - Indictus
• Alexander Chee - How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
• Peter Ho Davies
• Linda Gregg - “We Manage Most When We Manage Small”
• Monster (2023 film)

Transcript Episode Credits

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