Do you want to say anything about the arc of the book? I mean,

honestly, I had a lot of trouble sequencing and structuring the book.

That was something I really struggled with.

I actually hired a poet friend of mine, Serena Brown, to help me kind of sequence the book because I had been, you know, when you've been looking at the poems for so long, it's really hard to kind of zoom out and take a bird's eye view of what it's doing as a book, as opposed to just agonizing over line breaks as I had been doing for many, many months at that point.

So they helped me kind of structure this into the three parts and helped me think a little bit about the narrative arc of the book, if there is one, which I think there kind of loosely is.

I did want to end on... on more hopeful notes because as I was writing this book, a lot of it, and this is something I'll say more of after I read the next poem, but a lot of it was written during the early pandemic days when there were all these uprisings and all this uncertainty and upheaval.

And I was feeling really a little bit hopeless about the world.

Let's hear Year of the Pig.