Erin Belieu joins us for the Breaking Form interview to talk about her New and Selected Poems, Cocklebur!

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Notes:

Belieu is the author of 6 books of poetry, including Come-Hither Honeycomb (2020); Slant Six (2014); Black Box (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; One Above & One Below (2000); and Infanta (1995), selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series, and most recently, Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems.

Read a review of Cocklebur in Literary Hub here.

Read the title poem "Cocklebur" and order the book here.

Visit Erin's website here: https://www.erinbelieu.com/

Watch Erin read alongside Carl Phillips and Maggie Dietz here. And you can watch her read "The Scent from a Cupboard" from Cocklebur here.

Read this fabulous conversation with Erin and former Breaking Form guest Joy Priest in On the Seawall.

Tour the Library at the Breakers

"The Pope's Penis" is a 7-line poem by Sharon Olds which appears in her 2nd book, The Gold Cell (1987)

Read Erin's "The Death of Humphrey Bogart" mentioned in the pod here.

Some of the other flower/plant names we read include: bastard toadflax, pussytoes, hellebore, cow vetch, candytuft, scarlet pimpernel, skunk cabbage, sneezeweed, and toad lily.

The ladies revisit the post-reading Q&A's most classic questions. Play along!

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Notes:

The reading James went to was with Matt Bell, who was recently a judge for the National Book Award in Fiction. You can watch the reading and the Q&A here.

The residency James mentioned is Civitella Ranieri, which lodges artists, composers, and writers in a beautiful thick-walled 15th century castle – a fortress that provided protection, sustenance, and renewal to generations of the Ranieri family and its extended community.

The poem "After My Mother Apologized for My Childhood, We Went to Brunch" appears in Aaron Smith's book Stop Lying, and also on his spoken word album, Outside the Lines, which you can listen to here.

Here's some advice about getting published from Poets.org.

We mention the following online magazines:

On the Seawall (ed. Ron Slate)

Under a Warm Green Linden

The Commuter/Electric Lit

Memorious (rip; June 2023 was the last issue), ed. Rebecca Morgan Frank

Limp Wrist

Beauty's where you find it, not just where you bump and grind it, the girls discover.

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Notes:

The documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is a 91-minute biographical film directed by Sasha Waters that explores the life, career, and private world of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. You can watch it on YouTube for free here.

Read Mary Oliver's essay "Bird" here and her poem "Summer Day" here.

Janna Levin's book How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space is a popular 2023 book that mixes memoir and visionary science. Levin is a leading astrophysicist. Find her online at https://jannalevin.com

Mark Doty's essay, "Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?" which also features Szymborska's "Photograph from September 11th."

Patricia Hampl's most recent books are the nonfiction book The Art of the Wasted Day (2019) and It's Come to This, which pairs her nonfiction text with illustrations. The book itself is 36 pages, bound with quarter yellow leather over illustrated paper-covered boards, and enclosed in a cloth clamshell box with a paper spine label. Only 75 copies were printed; the copy I found online retails for $1500.

Watch a short interview and reading by Tyree Daye here.

Read more about Patrick Radden Keefe's book London Falling

You can read the beginning of Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow in the New Yorker here.