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 very fortunate to have as my guest, Clayton Eschelman,

whose most recent book of poetry is an alchemist with one eye on fire.

His book of essays has also come out, archaic design, from the same publisher, Black Widow Press.

It's a relatively new press located in Massachusetts with a very impressive list of translations

of surrealist poetry and more still to come and more Eschelman as well.

Now, I want to begin by trying to place my relationship to the work of Clayton Eschleman.

It took me a while because as a poet, he puts you in worlds between.

The human is linked with the animal.

The organic is linked with the fleshy and the menstrual.

And for a very long time, I would say, it's sticky, it's yicky, I'm afraid of it.

And then something happened.

I began to see that through these physical juxtapositions and pairings, we were being led to an alteration of the senses

that the poems, in a sense,

want to take you into the world

that's beyond the conscious world

and to do so a series of violent yokings,

...