After a summer hiatus, I chat with Nicole Cooley about Lucille Clifton's poem "June 20" from her 1992 collection The Book of Light, which was re-released by Copper Canyon last year with an introduction by Ross Gay and an afterword by Clifton's daughter Sidney Clifton. We talk about the unusual verb tense, what's scary about the poem, and just how sharp Clifton's images are. After that, Nicole shares her poem "Downriver" from her new collection Mother Water Ash. We close with a game about poetry in the Olympics. The episode is brought to you by Olympic Poems.

Also mentioned:

• Sharon Olds's poem "I Go Back to May 1937"
• Anne Panning's essay "Remembering, I Was Not There" (collected in In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal)
• The world's unluckiest pole vaulter