Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

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

Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Eloise Klein Healy.

She is the first ever poet laureate of Los Angeles, and her new and selected poems

has just been published in a volume called A Wild Surmise, published by Red Hen Press,

and she has made this book a revolution in book making because the many poems have quick response

symbols so that you can hear Eloise reading the poems on your smartphone. Quite an amazing thing.

Now, Eloise is someone who has always been called,

level-headed, good-hearted, warm, straightforward, a straight shooter.

Only I can't call her a straight shooter anymore

because she's neither straight

and to call someone a shooter is no longer a compliment.

So I thought instead that I'd ask,

Louise, how the language of poetry

has changed since you've started writing

all these years now.

Wow.

...