Ten years in the making, poet Rickey Laurentiis joins us to talk about her much-anticipated remarkable new collection Death of the First Idea. “In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives,” says the back copy on this book, whose poetry fittingly resists easy categorization. Oracular and lyrical, mythic and confessional, archaic and futuristic, personal and communal, Rickey’s poetry takes us far and wide, from Ancient Greece to New Orleans to Palestine, from Dante to Emily Dickinson to her own past and future selves. As Safiya Sinclair says: “Here is a poet in an ecstatic trance, dancing with the muses. Each page is an inferno of linguistic fervor, reforging trans identity and femme imagination. Deeply felt, rigorous, and erudite, these poems strike deep in the mind and stick to the soul. Startling and raw and exquisitely fearless, above all, these poems choose to live.”

For the bonus audio archive Rickey contributes a reading of a new poem, written just two days before this conversation was recorded, entitled “Second Nature.” This joins bonus audio from everyone from Danez Smith to Torrey Peters, Jorie Graham to Dionne Brand. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s episode