You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite poets to select a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss.

Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is Margaret Atwood, the prolific poet and novelist known for brilliant books like The Handmaid's Tale and the Blind Assassin.

Her many distinctions include the LA Times Innovators Award, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the Penn Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and not one, but two Booker Prizes, most recently for the Testaments.

Margaret, welcome.

Thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure.

So the poem you've chosen from the archive is a stranger by Saeed Jones.

Tell us what was it about this particular poem that caught your attention?

Well, it's about a dead mother, and of course, I've got one.

And I think probably a lot of people have.

But also, it's very clear.

So you get it.

You don't have to dwell a lot on analyzing it. There aren't a lot of puzzles in it

except the big puzzle, which is where do people go when they die? And as we say, it spoke to me.

Excellent. Let's listen to the poem. Here's Margaret Atwood reading A Stranger by Sayy Jones.

A Stranger.

I wonder if my dead mother still thinks of me.

I know I don't know her new name.

I don't know her, not now.

...