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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good-nosed to bird?

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

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblot, and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm very thrilled to have as my guest, Amy Gersler. She is a poet who lives in Los Angeles. I have known her

since her very earliest poems, because both of us attended the Wednesday night poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque, and there were many others

with us, among them Dennis Cooper, Jim Crusoe, Jack Skelly. It was a fabulous era for poetry.

We went on Wednesday for the workshop, on Friday for the reading. And Amy has

just written a new book of poetry. Her work is published by Penguin. It all comes out originally in

paperback. The book is called Index of Women. And it seems,

Amy, as if this index, what you call this shattered epic, has been made available sometime in some unknown future. Is this a book that is an aftermath of everything

we're going through? Well, it's a book that kind of straddles the part of what we're going through.

I wrote a lot of the book before the pandemic,

but I was editing it and finishing up the last few poems during the pandemic. There's a whiff

of some of that in the book, and the political difficulties and horrors that the United States has been going through

prior to that are definitely also a small through line in the book as well.

This is a book that if you've never felt you could read poetry and always wanted to,

this is the book to go to.

It's a thrilling and beautiful book containing poems about the tooth fairy and about giraffes.

Amy has been a poet who's been successful at combining mourning with exuberance.

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