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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zimberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm excited to have poet Alice Fulton on the show.

She is the third in our series of women poets.

Last week, we heard from Ray Armantrout, and before that,

Mexican poet Pura Lopez Colomé, along with her translator, poet Forrest Gander. You can hear those

conversations at KCRW.com slash bookworm. You know, when I was lecturing at Cornell University several years ago, Alice Fulton and I met,

and we found ourselves drifting into a conversation that had unimaginable depth.

I think her mother had just died, and I said why are you teaching you shouldn't be teaching this

takes such a long time to recover from and we saw each other several years after that had

another unfathomable conversation and I came to realize that Alice Fulton is a poet

in whose presence, I go to the bottom of my lake.

You know, it's sort of like I don't know what I'm saying or why, but I find myself speaking very directly to you.

And then I heard that Alice Fulton was coming to Los Angeles,

that her last book, Cascade Experiment, was a selected poems.

It had no new poems in it.

That she had just, just completed a new manuscript called Barely Composed,

...