LA has the largest jail system in the country.

You got people that've been in jail just like one time and their life can't get nothing because of whatever mistake they made.

I stole some ground turkey because I wanted to feed my family. We was hungry.

Off the Block. Stories tracing the path from city block to cell block and back.

Available September 13th at KCRW.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good? No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books? From KCRW and KCRW.

I'm Michael Silverblatt and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is the poet Adam Fitzgerald, whose new book is called George Washington.

When his first book came out and a celebration was made saying

that his language was as glorious as rhapsodic as any of Keats' odes, there was a moment

where he said, oh, thank you, and then perhaps said, but do I want it to be? And so the new book,

which is called George Washington, is a much more American book. It's much more the work of a poet

who was born in New Jersey, the figure of George Washington, and all of that vast,

past over question of what is Americana, broods in this book, and I thought the first thing to do was to hear the first poem. The poem is called

the Gordley Hudson, and this is Adam Fitzgerald, reading the first poem in his new book, George

Washington. Lordly Hudson. After my family died, there was a replacement family. I lost my dog,

but soon a replacement one arrived in tasselbow, the color of goose stuffing and liver.

...