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

Today I am in Iowa City, recording in Iowa City, at the home of James Galvin.

I'm a distinguished guest, Imagine, at the writing program at the home of James Galvin. I'm a distinguished guest, Imagine, at the writing program at the University of Iowa,

and it's a great pleasure and honor to be here, doubly so, because James Galvin is one of the people

whose enormous depth of feeling, combined with a certain resistance to it,

which we call toughness, makes for what I call an abraded tenderness that you can hear

throughout his work and in his voice and in his new book,

as is, which is published by Copper Canyon Press, we hear a kind of new tone for him. It's the voice, I would say, of a certain kind of post-traumatic terror,

and that is competing with the desire to break back through into feeling,

which is a condition that we in America, many of us, share,

so that the poems are doing, if you'll pardon me, Jim,

a kind of sacerdotal thing,

in which we're being led through our terror in this book

back toward the accessibility of feeling and emotion and pliability and sensitivity and

pliability and sensitivity and tenderness.

A wonderful thing for a book of poems to do at this time. What do you say to that?

I agree with that as an assessment of my intention, I guess, although it wasn't an intention so much as,

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