You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine, and today we're discussing our latest interactive poetry feature.

When our feature poet Robin Costa Lewis discovered a trobe of photographs under her late grandmother's bed,

she recognized them not only as a document of her family's history during the Great Migration,

but also a testament to black intimacy and ingenuity across generations. From studio portraits to

snapshots, tin types to Polaroids, these pictures provide the foundation of Robin's new book

to the realization of perfect helplessness,

excerpts from which we've published on New Yorker.com.

Robin Coxel Lewis formerly served as poet laureate of Los Angeles, and her debut collection,

Voyage of the Sable Venus, won the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry.

Robin, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. I'm so honored to be here with you.

Me too. It's so good to see you. We often joke that we're cousins because our families are from the same part of Louisiana.

And I think that's such a center in this book. Tell us about your sense of Louisiana before we hear

a little bit of this new extraordinary work. Now, that's a question I didn't see coming. Thank you for

asking. Tell you about Louisiana. That would take... Yes, the short version. Not the long Louisiana version.

This is the New Yorker, you know, four-minute version.

Let me just try to figure this out.

Louisiana, for me, is a very singular place on the globe.

And the Mississippi River geographically, of course, a very singular place on the globe.

And the Mississippi River geographically, of course, is one of the most significant tributaries on the planet.

And so before we even get to human beings, you know, evolving and migrating into the Americas, that place was already very special geographically.

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