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 Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today I have as my guest, David St. John, whose new book is from Harper Collins.

It's called The Face.

It's a novella in verse.

And I think even the subtitle is meant to be kind of funny.

Well, to me, since it's a collection of poems,

it's meant to cut both ways.

Right.

And so I'm happy you sense that.

Well, it's a strange kind of both finiquiness and presumption that the poem has throughout.

This is, this is in a certain way, a loudspeaker poem in which the microphone is picking up all kinds of things usually left private.

In other words, this microphone is unusually sensitive to the tones of self-pity,

to self-traumatization, and to hysteria, of a certain sort that's being modulated by the elegance of the line

and then blown out of proportion by the length of the line

so that everything is simultaneously in perspective and out of perspective.

And I think that it's given the state of the condition of the speaker, the person who walks us through the movie of this book, since one of the conceits is that a movie is being made of his life, that the line has exactly that kind of elasticity that you're describing.

In terms of the arc of the narrative, since it's a more cohesive sense of a true narrative arc,

...