Hi, 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 a 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 wherever you buy bucks. My guest today is Tracy Brimhall. She's the author

of five poetry collections, including Our Lady of the Ruins, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize.

She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service.

She's the Poet Lord of Kansas and the 2025 Poet in Residence at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Tracy, welcome. Thanks so much for joining.

Thanks, Kevin.

So the first poem you've chosen to read is Refrigerator, 1957 by Thomas Lux.

What is it about this particular poem that struck you looking through the anthology?

Well, in the opening to the anthology, you talk about refrigerator poems as this idea of

the poems that people keep in their wallets or might actually put on their refrigerator if they

receive a print copy of the magazine. And I was thinking about that idea of like, what are my sort of

totemic poems or the poems that I used to

wallpaper my New York apartment with. And this was both literally titled refrigerator

and was an early poem that I loved. I don't wallpaper my home anymore, but I do, I call it meditating in cursive. I still hand

copy beloved poems into a book. And I find that it is a way to sort of tend the coals and keep my

relationship to poetry warm even when I might not be writing, or even when

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