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 choose 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 Sandra Cisneros, who is the recipient of a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize,

a National Medal of Arts, the Ford Foundation's Art of Change Fellowship,

and the Penn Nabokov Award for Achievement and International Literature.

Welcome. Thanks for being here.

Hey, I'm surprised. I'm the most astonished. Thank you so much. Oh, not at all. I'm really excited to hear

your poem and this first poem, which you've selected to read, which is Shelter by Jose Antonio Rodriguez.

What drew you to this particular poem? Well, it's by a Mexican. That's one. Someone from the border, Jose Antonio was born in Mexico and is a citizen of the United States and has an incredible collection of poetry that tells the story of people who grew up on both sides of the border.

So first, it's someone who's writing about something I care about, border issues.

Absolutely, and I love this poem. Let's hear it.

This is Sandra Cisnau's reading Shelter by Jose Antonio Rodriguez.

Shelter.

Don't misunderstand me.

I love a good poem, like half my Facebook friends, one that transport you

to a corner of the soul you didn't know was there, because you couldn't find the precise metaphor,

even if you felt it. Like that time my parents saw a local news story of an older woman asking for help with an

ailing husband, and I volunteered to drive them to the address on screen, a neighborhood I'd

never driven through, though it looked familiar with its usual poverty.

A few leaning boards called a house, and inside the woman from the news in half-light,

thanking us for the comforters in our hands and pointing to a fold-out chair we could place them

...