Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

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

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Campbell McGrath, whose new book, Paxatomica, has recently

been published by Echo.

We're here at the Library of the Lannin Foundation in

Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of my favorite places to tape, and there is a small audience of admirers

with us. Now, it's funny, Campbell. This new book excites from its flap verb the announcement that it's both a continuation and a new direction from the previous books,

which include the first one, capitalism, American

noise, Rhode Atlas, spring comes to Chicago, the Florida poems.

In what way do you take it to be a new direction?

Well, I think it's more of a continuation than a new direction, first of all.

So there's a certain amount of false promise in that flap copy there.

But, I mean, I actually most significantly view this book as the kind of closing of a cycle in my work,

in that I kind of see a real linkage amongst these six books. I mean, I really feel

that Paxatomica goes back and talks very much to American noise in the kinds of poems.

They are the more kind of traditional lyric poems and the way form is used in the book.

If it's forward-looking, it's in poems like The Human Heart that are kind of

opening up to a not narrowly American topic or subject area, which is something we spoke

...