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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

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.

I'm very fortunate today.

Angie Melenko was coming to town and reading here in Los Angeles,

and I thought this would be a wonderful time to talk to her about her work,

and she familiarized me both with her first three books,

the most recent is Shoulder Season,

but also with her new book,

Marvelous Things Overheard.

And we'll be hearing some of these poems.

But first I want to acknowledge that she has been living the life of a poet as a poet lives today.

She spent time after graduation from Brown in Morocco, moved back to New York, went to Lebanon,

now is in Texas, and a poet is blown by the winds of the possibility of employment or spousal employment or the desires

of children and the demands of poetry. Is there a poet's life today? Well, when I was younger

and had more autonomy or I thought I had more autonomy, I enjoyed

traveling and moving around from place to place. And now I think that it was quite frivolous of me,

because now it seems that I move not by choice, but where employment takes me or my husband and it seems to

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