Danielle Sellers

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we invite you to explore the world of poet Danielle Sellers reading from her collection, Bone Key Elegies available from Main Street Rag. Inhabited by tribes of beautiful, semi-wild children destined to suffer and become wise, its beaches and cities shine by the light of her radiant details. And at the center, all roads lead to the kingdom of her family, magnified into myth, ruled by a daughter who would scold gods and dogs alike. Please enjoy Danielle Sellers.

Andrew Lundwall

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are happy to bring you the dreamy, luxurious poetry of Andrew Lundwall. Lundwall's poetry evokes the dizzy, word-drunk hijinks of city sidewalk culture when Imagism was cafe entertainment and absinthe was no joke. Please accept this invitation into the world of Andrew Lundwall. 

Caki Wilkinson

Caki Wilkinson's acrobatic brilliance--her nimble rhythms, double-jointed tropes, and gravity-defying rhymes--performs its signature moves in poems of such quick-wit and virtually effortless skill the rapt, delighting observer can only marvel at how, in just the moment it takes to catch one's breath, they break the heart. Ladies and Gentlemen, Children of all Ages, Please enjoy Caki Wilkinson.

Richard Siken

Welcome to the one year anniversary of Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are proud to bring you the poetry of Richard Siken. Siken's work is fun and cool and frightening like a boyhood friend who sees no reason to stop wrestling just because one of you has lost a tooth. Please enjoy the poetry of Richard Siken.

Danielle Pafunda

We are proud to present Danielle Pafunda reading a creative lecture. With dizzying erudition, she delights us at the intersection of poetry and scholarship, biology and criticism. The effect is something like a psychedelic sermon. Please enjoy Danielle Pafunda.

Sabrina Orah Mark

Sabrina Orah Mark is a poet-fabulist whose work is part ghost story, part myth, and part sacred text. Each poem is like an artifact from a sealed and secret vault; each poem is itself a sealed and secret vault, beckoning, glistening, and exhorting any would-be opener to enter carefully and to remember what wonder feels like. There is eeriness, and levity, and eerie levity; there is exultant familiarity set against ominous inscrutability. Listen as Sabrina reads from her forthcoming book Tsim Tsum, and introduces us to Walter B., Beatrice, and The Oldest Animal—characters who, like the world they inhabit, are perpetually on the brink of disappearance.

Matt Bondurant

Matt Bondurant is the international bestselling author of The Third Translation. His second novel, The Wettest County in the World, inspired by his favorite relative will be available in the fall. But as spring turns to summer, Bondurant reminds us that the best novelists are also poets. Please enjoy Matt Bondurant.

Nida Sophasarun

Nida Sophasarun's poems refuse to sit still. The liveliness of her mind means that a household's collection of glasses are as worthy of her careful attention as exotic birds in far-flung places. The generosity of these poems means that her readers learn, in the grace of the poems' unfoldings, how the nonhuman elements in our worlds speak to the vulnerability of the individual who is looking for connection. Hers are lines you want to read slowly, out loud, delighting in the words as well as the twists and turns that they lead you through, because Nida Sophasarun is "telling you the truth / even if it's not all // completely true."

Cecily Parks

Cecily Parks’s poems investigate the natural world, the landscape of the American West, and their inhabitants (current, past and imagined). While searching for and extracting signs from their surroundings, many of her speakers call out for something – some force – to move them. In these moments she crafts lines that are at once graceful, haunting and heart-breaking. Reading from her first collection of poems, Field Folly Snow, this is Ms. Cecily Parks.

MC Hyland

MC Hyland is a mix of the austere and the bright. Her work plays on hard travels and the less bruised expectations preceding them, while also collaging the wild and the far away (tigers, serpents, convertibles, prophets). In all, Hyland's poems make us glad that the world is as severe as it is, just so that her eye can fall on it and tell us about its sharp edges. We are pleased to bring you MC Hyland and these wonders, as she prints a broadside on a letterpress late into the Alabama night.

Daniel Groves

Groves' work is superlative in his generation: it is both the most traditional, in that its roots extend the widest and deepest into our tradition, and the most relevant, with its gaze fixed on the vanities and verities of today; it is both the smartest and, at times, the silliest. Even as these verses befuddle us, a superficial examination will certify them as the wittiest, but anyone who loves poetry will recognize that, though he eschews sentimentality, Groves has written some of the saddest poems of the new century. We are the proudest of podcasts to bring you Daniel Groves.

Amy King

It's Christmastime, and what better way to celebrate than with good food, good wine, a good friend ... and her poems. In this reading, Amy King takes us to dinner, but it is not bread alone that we enjoy. King's poems don't simply satisfy, they challenge us to reconsider our assumptions about language itself.

Donna Stonecipher

As the holidays begin we are proud to present Donna Stonecipher. Her poetic narratives suggest the possibilities of unconscious life, experienced as we sleep, whether dreams or nightmares. But listeners will find that Stonecipher’s affecting images are the products of an acutely awake and aware existence. They are, in fact, hyper-real. She allows us a rare glimpse of the sublime that appears only when we are brave enough to contemplate so thoroughly as to overcome those fictions that conveniently insulate our psyches and create our false notions of “reality." Please enjoy Donna
Stonecipher.

Ryan Wilson

At the end of October, as working adults around America put serious thought into what Halloween Costume to wear, it is appropriate that we listen to Ryan Wilson, a poet who finds the place between past and present, maturity and immaturity, childhood and adulthood, where most of us live. He has returned with riches. In the tradition of Donald Justice and Stanley Plumley, we give you Ryan Wilson.

Mark Leidner

In the midst of September we are proud to bring you the work of poet Mark Leidner. It is difficult to describe Leidner's work without using the word "uncanny," and yet he begins so simply. His poems are deceptively conversational, as if talking to a friend at a bar or over the phone, but before you know it your brilliant friend has stopped kidding around and has lapsed into pure poetics. We hope you enjoy Mark Leidner's Apostrophecast.

Joan Biddle

As August ends, Joan Biddle reads poems of heartbreaking delicacy and intimacy. It might seem redundant to describe a poet's work as intimate . . . until you've heard Joan Biddle. Describing the French countryside and crab rangoon with the same care and wonder, Biddle invites us into a world as familiar as a favorite bathrobe and yet even "boners" achieve poetic luminosity. Miss Biddle's poetry makes friends and confidants of its readers.