Hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we ask a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss.

Then, they read one of their own poems from the magazine.

Today, my guest is the writer Saeed Jones, whose work has received a Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, the Penn Joyce

Osterweil Award for Poetry, and a Stonewall Book Award.

Saeed, welcome.

Thanks for being here with us.

Thanks for having me, Kevin.

So the first poem you've chosen to read from the archive is the wind blows through the

doors of my heart by Deborah Diggs.

What was it that drew you to this poem?

A lot of reasons.

I mean, one, I realized that I've had a long relationship with this poem.

I remember when Deborah Diggs passed away.

I was in graduate school at Rutgers, Newark.

And so that kind of brought a renewed attention to her work just personally.

You know, it was kind of I loved studying her before, but then I wanted to go back and to kind of, I don't know, show my appreciation.

And this was one of the first poems and books that I picked up during that period.

And this point just grabbed me immediately

and broke my heart and mended it together and broke it again and mitted it together line by line.

But also just over the years, you know, I've experienced grief. I've experienced loss.

I've been with friends and loved ones as they've, you know, gone through similar experiences.

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