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 invite a poet 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.

The poems were featuring in this episode also appear in the anthology 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 Sasha DeBevick McKenny, who is the author of the new poetry collection,

Joy is my middle name.

She was a J.C. and Ruth Hall's poetry fellow at the University of Wisconsin and a creative

writing fellow at Emory University.

Her poems have been published widely. Sasha, welcome.

Thank you for joining me. Hi, Kevin. I'm so happy to be here. The first poem you've chosen to read

is Hammond B3 Organ Cistern by Gabrielle Calvaceresi. What was it about this particular poem that caught your attention when you were looking through the anthology?

I just love this poem.

It's so important to me.

It feels like it's a part of me, and I just want other people to read it.

Great.

Why don't we listen to the poem?

Here's Sasha DeBevick McKenney, reading Hammond B3 Organ Cistern by Gabrielle Calvo Carressey.

Hammond B3 Organ Cistern. The days I don't want to kill myself are extraordinary. Deep base, all the people in the streets waiting for their high fives and

leaping, I mean leaping when they see me. I am the sun-filled God of love, or at least an optimistic

under-secretary. There should be a word for it. The days you wake up and do not want to slit your

...