Careful conversations around poems and their worlds.
New Books in Poetry is a bookish interview series centered on poets, scholars, and close readers. Episodes move patiently through collections and critical work, linking craft to history, memory, politics, translation, and grief.
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New Books in Poetry presents poetry as a form of knowledge rather than ornament. The show is measured, literary, and interview-led. Its episodes usually begin with a book in hand, then follow the work outward into biography, history, textual detail, and cultural argument. A conversation about Avrom Sutzkever can turn on the physical pressure of a manuscript page, the angle of a line, and the conditions under which poems were copied. A discussion of Jennifer Wong can move from silence and forgiveness to the unfinished pain of friendship and regret. Sarah Howe’s Foretokens opens questions about hoarding, matrilineal memory, inherited archives, and the ethics of writing another person’s pain. Crystal Simone Smith’s erasure project places historical language under pressure, asking what democratic documents omit as well as what they declare. Manuel Iris’s bilingual book brings Hieronymus Bosch beside a fictional migrant worker, making visual art, migration, and poetic form answer one another. Conor Mc Donnell’s long poem brings television, spectatorship, and violence into a dense meditation on cultural watching. Eric Weiskott’s work links medieval allegory with contemporary political life, letting old poetic machinery speak in newly unsettled ways. The pace is deliberate. Guests are allowed to build an answer instead of compressing it into a sound bite. The host presence can vary, but the editorial habit remains consistent: frame the question, let the book breathe, then return to the craft. This is not casual literary chat. It is closer to a public seminar with humane curiosity and a strong sense of textual evidence. The show suits listeners who want poetry connected to archives, translation, politics, art history, illness, grief, and the difficulty of memory. It also rewards patience. The best moments arrive when a line, image, or formal device becomes a way of thinking about a life.
Made for: For serious readers, poets, students, teachers, and literary listeners who enjoy close reading with historical and critical context. It best suits those who prefer patient interpretation to quick recommendations.
What sets it apart: The show gives poetry the full scholarly treatment while keeping the conversation anchored in individual books and specific lines of thought. Its range is unusually broad, moving from medieval allegory and Yiddish archives to contemporary elegy, erasure, bilingual work, and political poetics.
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Close questioning connects poetic form to archives, memory, cultural research, and the difficult choices behind individual poems.
New Books in Poetry treats a collection as an invitation to examine how poems are built, revised, and made answerable to experience. Conversations led by Holly Gaddery and John Yargo give poets room to explain formal choices, from Jennifer Wong's handling of silence and…
A poet watches all of Twin Peaks for a page and a half; you get to hear why.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A manuscript's marks turn Ten Poems into a record of poetry made under wartime pressure.
Avrom Sutzkever's Ten Poems comes through as a manuscript whose physical marks carry much of the episode's force. The discussion stays close to crossed-out words, underlining, angular Yiddish script, and a self-confident title, treating those details as part of how the work…
A quiet, patient episode on poetry, guilt, silence, and what writing can hold when forgiveness stays unresolved.
The episode works through the hard ground between silence and forgiveness, staying close to a poem framed as a letter to a colleague who died after an accident.
A thoughtful discussion of hoarding, poetic form, and the ethics of shaping pain into art.
Sarah Howe's poetry volume is framed here as an archive under pressure, beginning with her mother's hoarding and widening into Howe's own uneasy sense of inherited archival impulse.
A long poem turns deep Twin Peaks immersion into a compact study of pain, spectatorship, and self-scrutiny.
A long poem shaped by Twin Peaks turns obsessive viewing into a question about how culture teaches people to look at pain. The episode follows the guest from Fire Walk with Me through the original series, a three-hour film that gathers the pieces, and an 18-hour revisiting…
A medieval dream vision finds a strange, forceful afterlife in contemporary poetry.
Erik Weisskopf's effort to let medieval allegory speak in the present gives this New Books Network conversation its frame. He talks through Cycle of Dreams, where Langland's voice, reshaped through translation, sits on the left side of each page opening while original poems…
A May 1943 manuscript becomes a record of pressure, memory, and the marks that carry literary history.
Sutzkever: Ten Poems considers what the survival of a manuscript can bring to the poems themselves. It follows the May 1943 date, Sutzkever's work in the Paper Brigade, and the FPO's plans to defend the ghetto, then settles into the page: blue ink giving way to black,…
Charles Taylor considers how poetry might restore a sense of participation in the world.
Charles Taylor treats poetry as a way to recover contact with the world in an age of disenchantment. In conversation with Laura Laurent about Cosmic Connections, he sets poetic experience beside philosophy and scientific detachment.
Long-form Apple talk with sharp product judgment and deep tech history.
Weekly film, music, and arts criticism from Monocle 24's Midori House studio in London.
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Host Holly Gattery interviews poet Yvonne Blomer about her collection 'Death of Persephone: A Murder', which explores violence against women through the Persephone myth.
This episode is an interview with Diamond Forde about her upcoming book 'The Book of Alice' published by Scribner in 2026, preceded by a promotional message for the NewBooks Network audience survey.
An interview with Eli Clare about their book 'Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming', a queer disabled love song to trees.
An archival manuscript takes center stage.
Charles Taylor comes in through poetry, not publicity.
A manuscript seems restless.
Forgiveness begins in silence.
Hoarding frames the conversation.
Crystal Simone Smith discusses her erasure of Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' to address contradictions in founding documents.
Award-winning poet Manuel Iris discusses his bilingual poetry collection juxtaposing Hieronymus Bosch's painting with a fictional migrant worker.
A poem can begin with watching.
A medieval dream vision gets pulled into the present.
A discussion of Walter Scott Peterson's article on William Carlos Williams's epic poem Paterson, published in the William Carlos Williams Review.
A conversation with Ilana Rosen about her book on Israeli documentary poetry and its relation to the state's development.