Episode 456

with Roger Reeves, Franny Choi, and Derrick Brown with The Helio Sequence

To celebrate National Poetry Month, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello share listener-penned haikus and invite three poets to the house party; Roger Reeves tells us why poetry is the harbinger of the future; Franny Choi discusses how she incorporated Google Translate and the Turing Test into her latest collection Soft Science; and Derrick C. Brown teams up with indie band The Helio Sequence for a rhythmically-moving poetry performance.

Roger Reeves
Poet

Roger Reeves is a poet who, in his own words, wants to be “catapulted into a poem.” He earned his Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently an associate professor of poetry. Reeves’s work has been selected for anthologies, earned him a prestigious NEA Fellowship and Pushcart Prize, and has been published in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and The Believer, among others. His first collection, King Me, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013, and his second book is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Reeves’s wide-ranging cultural references and visceral imagery capture the rhythm of the world around him--and we love his momentum.Poets.org • King Me

Franny Choi
Poet

Franny Choi is all about asking loaded questions. A poet, performer, editor, and playwright, Choi is the author of the poetry collection Floating, Brilliant, Gone, the chapbook Death by Sex Machine, and Soft Science, which was published in 2019. Her writing examines issues of trauma, identity, memory, and perception while asking questions of the mind and body, making her work feel both cerebral and physical. Choi's poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, and the New England Review, among others, and has published essays in The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, and the PEN Poetry Series. Choi is currently a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in English at Williams College, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and the cohost of the Poetry Foundation's podcast, VS, alongside fellow poet Danez Smith. Website • Twitter

Derrick C. Brown
Poet

Derrick C. Brown is a novelist, comedian, poet, and storyteller. He is a former paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne and is the owner and president of Write Bloody Publishing, which Forbes and Filter Magazine call one of the best independent poetry presses in the country. In 2013, his book Strange Light was named Texas Book of The Year for Poetry, and his other books of poetry include Hello. It Doesn't Matter (2018) and How the Body Works the Dark: New and Revised Poems (2020). The New York Times calls his work “…a rekindling of faith in the weird, hilarious, shocking, beautiful power of words.” He lives in Portland, Oregon. Website • Twitter