Hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite poets to select a poem from the New Yorker archives to read and

discuss.

Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is Aria Aber, a Whiting Award recipient, our current Wallace-Segner Fellow at Stanford University, and the author of Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in poetry.

Ariah, welcome.

Hello.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

So the first poem you decide to read today is Halflight by Frank Bedard.

Tell us what was it that drew to this poem as you were looking over the archive?

I guess I've been reading and rereading this poem for a very long time,

and its meaning has changed over the last few years for me personally.

And I just think it's such an unusual and very special elegy.

Well, why don't we hear the poem?

Here's Aria Aber reading Halflight by Frank Bedard.

Halflight.

That crazy drunken night, I maneuvered you out into a field outside of Coachella.

I'd never seen a sky so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives still were sprinkled

with glistening white shells from the ancient seabed beneath us

that receded long ago. Parallel, we lay in parallel furrows. That suffocated, fearful look on your

...