You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Kate Braverman, the author most recently of Wonders of the West,

author as well of squandering the blue, palm latitudes, lithium from Medea, as well as,

is it four books of poetry?

Four books, all of them out of print.

I wanted to begin, you know, I began reading your work with this book.

You know, it was new to me.

And I wanted to begin by talking about the writing style because it seems quite unusual to me.

It seems to be written in a kind of spasm.

Do you know what I mean?

There seems to be convulsions of imagination as a methodology for the book.

It seems almost to be written out of pure, raw intuition.

Well, all my books are written out of pure, raw intuition,

and I'm only concerned with language,

and I'm only concerned with the essence of language.

And Neruda, my favorite poet,

says there's two things that make a poem,

the net and the air that falls between the meshes.

...