22 min listen
Read By: Mag Gabbert
From92Y's Read By
ratings:
Length:
8 minutes
Released:
Aug 8, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Mag Gabbert on her selection: I read Kathryn Nuernberger's essay "A Thin Blue Line," which comes from her wonderful collection of essayettes, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. I return to these pieces often because they give me new ideas about limits—what can happen to a poem if it's allowed just a little more room to breathe, if those braces or splints that keep it packed into tight lines and stanzas are taken off? And: what happens to prose when it's distilled down to marrow? "A Thin Blue Line" somehow accomplishes both of these, and it does so while weaving Nuernberger's personal narrative together with bits of research material and shreds of fairy tale. To me, this piece strikes the perfect note between genres; it isn't hybrid in the sense that it checks none of the boxes, but because it checks all of them. And this is the kind of work I turn to when I need to reimagine the boundaries of my own relationship with language, to see how I might shape it differently and ask it to function in new ways. Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, by Kathryn Nuernberger Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Released:
Aug 8, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (83)
Read By: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on their selections: Chekhov’s story “The Beggar” was written in 1887, when Chekhov was 27. This was the moment in his life when he was turning from his early comic sketches to something a bit more serious.... by 92Y's Read By