Kate Baer, HOW ABOUT NOW: Poems
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Recorded live at the Whitby Hotel, Zibby interviews renowned, #1 New York Times bestselling poet Kate Baer about her latest work, a raw, luminous, and urgent collection titled HOW ABOUT NOW. Kate opens up about the health crisis that reshaped her life and work, her evolving relationship with her body, and the lingering impact of past trauma. She also talks candidly about motherhood, marriage, anxiety, and the strange intimacy of writing poems that expose so much and still leave room for humor and tenderness.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Totally Booked Live at the Whitby Hotel. |
| 0:05.0 | I am so excited to be here today with Kate Baer, New York Times, best-selling poet, and someone |
| 0:11.8 | who I have just so much respect for and read her substack and she's just awesome. |
| 0:15.3 | Anyway, welcome. |
| 0:16.3 | Thank you, Zivie. |
| 0:17.3 | It's so lovely to be here. |
| 0:18.1 | Yay. |
| 0:19.1 | Yay. |
| 0:20.1 | Kate, okay, how about now is your new collection? |
| 0:23.4 | Congratulations. |
| 0:24.6 | You put so much into this collection, so many experiences that you somehow sum up with just a couple lines. |
| 0:33.2 | And we learned so much about you and your experience and your emotions. |
| 0:36.6 | Talk a little bit about this collection in particular and just tell everybody about it. |
| 0:42.7 | Yeah, this is my fourth poetry book. |
| 0:45.6 | Poetry is a funny thing because it's listed in the fiction section, so you can really hide behind that. |
| 0:51.4 | But at least for me, this book, just like my other books, is extremely |
| 0:55.2 | personal. I did have to delay its publication a year. It was supposed to come out last year. |
| 1:02.2 | But even though I've always been a really late bloomer, I got to experience a midlife crisis |
| 1:07.6 | very early at the very green age of 39. I went through some pretty serious health |
| 1:12.7 | issues and had to delay the book, but which ended up setting a stage for a lot of it, you know, |
| 1:19.1 | facing my immortality and kind of coming to terms with a lot of things that you do when you face |
| 1:25.2 | your own mortality. And also, you know, my kids getting older and |
... |
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