Hi, podcast listeners. It's Anne with the third episode of The News from Poems.

If you've been following this series, you know that for National Poetry Month,

we've invited five leading American poets to write an original work in response to current events.

We're partnering with the new poetry website, Asphodel. Info, and this week,

Nick Lance joins us from Huntsville, Texas, where he teaches English.

Huntsville is a couple of hours from Houston, and it's a place with character and setting

all its own.

Yeah, Huntsville is a university town.

It's also a prison town.

It's where the executions are conducted in the Texas prison system.

It's all very close together. I mean, that you can see some of the prison buildings, including the walls unit where the executions are from certain spots on campus.

The first year or so we lived there, it was really sort of salient for us that, you know,

you drive everywhere and you'd see the trustees us that, you know, you drive everywhere and you'd

see the trustees who are, you know, prisoners in the more minimum security units who would

be, like, out doing work on the side of the road or in the parks or things like that. And, you know,

they're guarded often by a guard on horseback with a shotgun.

It's very jarring if you're not used to that, but, you know, you live there for long

enough and it just sort of, I'd say it, but sort of fades into the background a little bit.

You could say that as a poet, Nick is interested in covert or clandestine aspects of all kinds of things.

He's published four award-winning books of poetry.

The first one grew out of his fascination with Donald Rumsfeld's speeches.

Another was inspired by the housing crisis.

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