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 a poet to choose 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.

The poems we're featuring today also appear in the anthology I recently

edited, A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, available for purchase from the

New Yorker store or wherever you buy books. Today, my guest is Megan Fernandez, whose books

include, I Do Everything I'm Told, and good boys. Her poems have been

published widely, and she's received fellowships from the Yado Foundation, the Sawani

Writers Conference, the Hawthorndon Foundation. She's currently an associate professor of English

and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College. Meg, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Kevin. I'm so excited to be here.

The first poem you've chosen to read is Half-Life in Exile, by Hala Alian. What drew you to this

particular poem while you were perusing the anthology? Yeah, actually, it was really hard to choose a poem

by Hala because all of them are absolutely astounding. I think she's one of the

best writers of our generation. And this is a poem that has sort of a sly way of thinking about

dehumanization. It kind of creeps up on you. It's about the failures of art in a way and also what can come of banishment.

And I think somehow she's able to do this with a lot of sensual imagery and also without

being overly didactic. So I think it's a poem that's doing kind of a lot with a lot and

sort of suspending both the moment that the poem was written,

which was published in 2021, but also is very relevant to our moment right now.

Let's listen to the poem.

...