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 archive to read and discuss,

along with a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine. My guest today is Deborah Landau, author of The Uses of the Body at the Last Usable Hour,

both Lannin Literary Selections.

She's received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry,

and she directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Welcome, Deborah.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for joining us today.

So the poem you've chosen from the archive is Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman, by Anne Sexton.

Can you tell us why this particular poem stood out to you?

Well, for several reasons, but I'll start by saying that it would have been Sexton's 90th birthday this month, and I thought it would be nice to read this in her honor.

Great. Let's hear it, and then we can talk after.

Little girl, my string bean, my lovely woman.

My daughter at 11, almost 12, is like a garden. Oh, darling, born in that sweet

birthday suit, and having owned it and known it for so long. Now you must watch high noon enter,

noon, that ghost hour. Oh, funny little girl, this one under a blueberry sky, this one.

How can I say that I've known just what you know and just where you are?

It's not a strange place, this odd home where your face sits in my hand, so full of distance, so full of its immediate fever.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe,

that miniature map of the world. And I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic buds all

engorged. Or I think even of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples

...