From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerd at Book Club. It's just like a regular book club, except we actually have no way of knowing if you read the book. This month's pick is Andrea Gibson's new collection of poems. It's called You Better Be Lightning. Just a note, before we get started, some of the poems

that we discuss in this episode deal with things like suicide and sexual assault. You will get a

heads up before we read those poems, but you know, you do whatever you need to do to take care of

yourself today. Now, this is normally where I would do a spoiler warning,

but it's poetry. I will say we did an interview with Andrea earlier this month. They are

amazing. It's a lovely conversation. I do recommend you take a listen to that. You can find it

wherever you found this podcast. But no pressure. Either way, we are glad to have you.

Today, we're going to discuss the collection with two poets. Here with me is Jennifer Huang. Their collection Return Flight will be out next month. Jennifer, welcome. Hello. Thank you for having me.

We also have Christopher Soto. He has a collection coming out next year. It's called Diaries of a Terrorist. Christopher. Hey.

Hello, hello, hello. Good to be here. So I wanted to start with what might seem like a silly question, but I was curious how you like to read poems. Like, is there a certain place you

want to sit? Is there, like, do you read them out loud? How do you most like to

consume a poem? What do you think, Jennifer? I like to consume poems in my bed with coffee in the

morning. And I do sometimes read them out loud. I think it's an interesting experience to read poetry out loud. I feel like

it gives it a spiritual quality sometimes that I really appreciate. That's really beautiful. What do you

think, Christopher? I'm all over the place. I'll be flipping through two, three, four books at a time.

Sometimes, you know, I'll go into the bathtub and I'll have my legs up above the

faucet and I'll be, you know, reading a whole poetry book in one sitting.

And sometimes I'll pick a book up and down and bounce around different poems and different

parts of it.

So I think it just

depends on my mood. And I think poetry kind of as a genre just allows for a lot of flexibility

in terms of how you interact with the, with, with the book. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

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