Hey, Tim Bidermis here. April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we're returning

this week to some of our favorite interviews with poets. Here's Andrew Limbong.

Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The first bit of advice you often get

when approaching poetry is, you gotta read it out loud.

Poetry can be just as much an oral medium as it is a written one.

But not always.

Raymond Antrobis is on the pod today.

He's a poet and he's deaf.

And he's got a memoir titled The Quiet Ear, an Investigation of Missing Sound.

In this interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly,

he talks about using his deafness as an aid to writing, something that makes his poetry

better. That's ahead. When writer Raymond Antrobus was a child, he had a hard time making

sense of the world around him. He struggled to hold conversations.

He missed instructions from his teachers.

He would get sent off to detention.

Everyone assumed he had a cognitive disability.

Until one day, his mother bought a telephone, a loud phone.

When it rang, it was piercing.

Everyone in his house seemed to notice but him. That is how

Raymond Antribus learned at six years old that he was deaf. Well, he's out with a new memoir called

The Quiet Ear, an Investigation of Missing Sound. Raymond, welcome. Oh, thanks for having me.

So to explain to people listening now, you were hearing aids.

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