Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast · Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall

Horsepower (with Special Guest Joy Priest)

March 23, 2026·53 min·4 clips

Joy Priest gets a big, theatrical entrance. Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall introduce her as a poet, scholar, Horsepower author, Louisville anthology editor, and the guest who cracked the room open. The mood stays loose but reverent, with the show's usual mix of literary heat, gossip, shade, laughter, queer art, and close attention to poems. Horsepower drives the episode. The excerpted poem moves through a Kmart parking lot, a getaway boy, girlhood adrenaline, bonfire dancing, and the pressure of being the only Black girl among strangers. The hosts hear the syntax snap. They sit with detail because it is doing more than decorating the scene. The crowded world of the poem feels like presence, ownership, and survival all at once. Then the craft talk gets personal. A host talks about the obsessive pull of the sestina, especially how end words keep coming back until they show what the poem cannot stop touching. The idea gets questioned almost as soon as it lands. The show lets that uncertainty breathe, and a Libra joke keeps the thinking from getting too neat. The strongest reading centers on claim. Seeing the world precisely becomes a way of saying, without smoothing anything over, that the speaker belongs there too. The conversation does not turn pain into spectacle. One host pushes back on easy words like harrowing, then brings in a family story about 130 cats to separate outside shock from lived reality. That turn gives the discussion its spine. It admits that the material is hard and charged without treating the poem like a display case. By the end, admiration spills outward. They send listeners toward another poet's books, mark the interview as the first of season four, and close in the show's own messy gospel: mind-blowing poetry, body positivity, queer fabulosity, and absolutely not being for everyone.

As heard by us

A lively poetry conversation that turns sharp detail and belonging into the episode's core stakes.

The episode puts Joy Priest's Horsepower in a conversation that moves between craft and lived experience. Breaking Form keeps its playful pace, then settles into close attention to a poem that matters for its syntax, detail, and force.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for queer poetry talk that gets spicy, gossipy, and still lands on something real.

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