Randall Brown

This episode we are very pleased to present the Flash Fiction of Randall Brown. Like the trout Mr. Brown is so adept at snaring, these strange and muscular tales are fast, sleek, and seem to appear out of nowhere -- bright and striving at end of his taut lines. Please enjoy the odd flash fiction of Randall Brown. 

Sheila Heti

This episode we are very pleased to bring you Sheila Heti. Both intense and delightful, Heti's work lures us in with brilliant reimaginings of powerful archetypes, then stings us with endings both surprising and inevitable. The result is a literature of the twilight world between reality and fantasy that instructs as it amazes. In "Autobiography of a Clown" Ms. Heti performs a kind of literary origami to fold and twist the story of a clown into a powerful extended meditation on a beautiful world we have lost, and the painful truths that remain the same. Please enjoy "Autobiography of a Clown."

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.

Alissa Nutting

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast, and this episode, to the exquisite hideousness of Alissa Nutting. Nutting's suburban feminist gothic prances over manicured lawns through palaces of neglect and dementia in which tracheotomies, self-produced teen porn and routine abortions are rites of passage from a childhood without innocence to an adulthood without maturity. Ms. Nutting's story, "I Feel Nothing 4U," is witty, charming and incredibly disturbing. Please enjoy Alissa Nutting.

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.

Brian Connell

Brian Connell is perhaps the best kind of dreamboat--one who is already betting on intimacy's work lasting longer than the glitter of high winds and long kisses. His songs hint at the golden lining of beginnings, but focus more fully on the entropy that he insists is where romance can be trusted in its exposure. These are not odes to melodrama or highliving. Connell's voice is plaintive, and he howls and croons not to sweep you off your feet, but to make your gut swing because he can call you on the lost moments of driving your car, standing at a party, cutting coupons, lost in the whammy of the world and one's place in it. Grandiose. Yes. The stuff of literature. Yes. These are odes to our empty pantries--the ones only holding candied yams and rice--that are
in most homes, both the happy and the sordid.

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.

Porochista Khakpour

In the cruelest month, we bring you Porochista Khakpour. The names of her characters are as old as history, and in these selections from her novel, she paradoxically collapses time and space in the experience of one universal family that could only exist in America today. Please enjoy Porochista Khakpour reading from Sons and Other Flammable Objects.

Amina Cain

Like the season itself, Cain's work is by turns sexual and beautiful, then suddenly harsh and cold. In every sentence she invokes a very familiar world of confusion and disappointment giving way to a much stranger world of promise and mystery. Please enjoy a world reborn in the short story Black Wings by Amina Cain

Carson Mell

The year has leapt, clocks have sprung forward, and to steady us, we present Carson Mell reading from his novel, Saguaro, a tale set in that rebel state, Arizona where high noon stays high noon all year round. In Saguaro, Mell gives us the life and adventures of aging musician, Bobby Allen Bird with narration that is utterly individual and never false, revealing to us, with what seems like effortless clarity, moments and impressions that we ourselves might forget to observe but that are life itself. 

Michael Swierz and Ying Xu translate Shu Ting

Shu Ting is the first contemporary female poet to gain mainstream acceptance from the literary establishment in The People's Republic of China. After coming of age during the turbulence of The Cultural Revolution, she was the only woman in "The Misty School" of poetry, whose other prominent members faced the kind of persecution American poets can hardly imagine. Ying Xu and Micheal Swierz are graduate students at the University of New Mexico, who met and forged a relationship over Shu Ting's words. As each helped the other understand the beauty and power of the modern world's two most widely spoken languages, Michael the poet and Ying the Academic, were inspired to record the translations, giving birth to these poems. As William H. Gass has said, "translating is reading, reading of the best, most essential, kind." So we are proud to give you Ying Xu and Michael Swierz reading and translating Shu Ting.

Harry Thomas

On the cusp of Valentine's Day, we bring you a tale of variations, Harry Thomas' "The Most Beautiful Boy in Alabama." Here, Thomas captures the many futures of beauty formed in limited geography: the wild and the fabled, the rebellious and the dull. This story has the makings of a perhaps fantastic Valentine—hot pink nail polish, sweaty hands, and a little fire. But there is more here than that, and in all it would be a dark valentine, indeed. We proudly bring you Harry Thomas.

Mary Phillip Sandy

This week we bring you Mary Phillip Sandy and her explorations in God and Country. As she investigates notions of Freedom, Motorcycles and Christian Rock, her descriptions fall squarely to give us a portrait of the implications and accessories of belief, as well as of her own hometown in rural Maine. We are proud to bring you Mary Phillip Sandy.

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.

Joshua Parkinson

For Thanksgiving, we bring you Josh Parkinson. Parkinson writes of a strange and beautiful world a funnier God might have built for his children in his backyard. But as much fun as it is to listen to Josh, something very like the truth is at stake. The story's whimsical exterior is like a candy shell on a diamond. Please Enjoy Josh Parkinson's " Maribeth V. The Government."

Josh is accompanied by the music of Steve Grubbs from Athens, GA, who performs as Little Francis. To learn more about Little Francis, please visit his MySpace page.

Click here to read the Apostrophe Cast interview with Josh Parkinson.

BJ Hollars

In the first half of November we are treated to the wise domestic humor of B.J. Hollars. A father's patience with a mouse is set against the background of a family losing patience with him. As he loses his eldest daughter to a boy friend, he must struggle with his squandered authority and his own impotent jealousy. Please enjoy "infestation."

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.

Richard Nathan

In the middle of October we hail Richard Nathan, a British adventurer who would be right at home with the likes of Robinson Crusoe or Dr. Livingstone. But his wilderness isn't to be found in the midst of far-away continents nor deep in a romantic past. His wilderness is North America and some of its longest-inhabited regions. His time is now. Mr. Nathan took a walk from Canada to Mexico. His adventure just might change the way you think about our country. Take this journey with Richard Nathan.

Kristen Iskandrian

With October so near, and still so warm, we bring you Kristen Iskandrian's exploration of the shapes of paper and glue, the hall smells, the return to the place where most of us have been and picked the carpet—school. As she reads from her ever growing project, The School, Iskandrian gives us a precise capture of the intense, mythical and scouring eye that such a place demands as it presents its pockets, wonders, and plain facts about function and future.

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.

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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.

Ned Oldham Launches Apostrophecast

In our first podcast, Ned Oldham of The Anomoanon graces us with a previously unreleased track, "The Wind," from the album "Songs From A Child's Garden of Verses." In this inspired project, Oldham has set Robert Louis Stevenson's deceptively simple poetry to music, and created an aural world both sublime and eerily familiar. Just as in Stevenson's poems, the apparent innocence of childhood is a conceit used to explore the wonder and melancholy of a world before, or beyond, dreary explanation. In "The Wind," a child considers the nature of air in motion with biblical sincerity. Oldham captures the emotion in sound. No mean feat. As the philosopher said, "Childhood is not a phase of life and it does not end." Listen to "The Wind" and Join us again on the 29th of August for poet Joan Biddle's Apostrophecast.

Dandy Elf

This week Dandy Elf reads from his new book Living Under the Mushroom. In the segment, he looks at his time as a shoe leather tanner. Elf is the author of 16 previous memoirs, the recipient of an NEA Grant, and the first person to be named a MacArthur genius fellow twice. Please find out more about Elf at his website www.littleman.com.