The Best American Poetry

Wendy Vitilak lives on the edge of a mesa in western Colorado.

Her poems and essays appear in Dark Horse, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, Rattle, O Magazine, Hudson Review, and elsewhere.

She is a two-time recipient of the Keats Soulmaking Award and winner of the Cantor Poetry Prize, the Fisher Prize, the Poetry by the Sea Sonnet Prize, and the Rattle Ekfrastic Prize.

That's a lot of prizes.

And she's also written a novel.

Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, the Yale Review, and the Paris Review.

Donna and I did what I call a poetry fest during her interview, where she read the following excerpt from her poem, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?

Can you help me find a medication for my mother's dementia and dress shoes that don't hurt my feet? Will you go to Trader Joe's and pick up the red onions I forgot and remind me to bring my cloth bag next time? Can you tell me why so much of the plastic we recycle is dumped into landfills? I would like to understand how a credit card-sized mosaic of microplastic ends up in our bodies every day.

So step away from the computer or typewriter for a bit and join us.

[upbeat music] Today my guest is author Cara Benson, whose writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Orion Magazine, Sierra Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, Terrain, and selected for Best American Poetry.

She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a BP Nichol Award.

She wrote a series on walking in the woods for the Best American Poetry website and taught poetry in a New York State correctional facility for eight years.

Her new book is a memoir called Arms Full of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment, just out from Health Communications Inc. and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

Welcome, Cara.

The Unbecoming is a volume of poetry of a mature poet who conveys a world that is both airy and grounded, a world mitigated by the wonders and the vapidity of language, Which is to say, through poetry, Kathy Fagan creates moments in time that resonate with me tremendously, just when I'm wondering if I'm really in this world as something more than a suffering body.

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Poetry.

She co-founded the MFA program at The Ohio State University, where she taught poetry and co-edited the journal and the Wheeler Poetry Prize book series for OSU Press.

Kathy, welcome to The Drunken Odyssey.

And she's also written a novel called About Yvonne.

Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and The Paris Review.

How about that? And she's a professor of English at Hunter College in New York City.

And as you know, with all of my musician guests in the middle, I do this thing called a song fest.