Monday, May 18 - Allison Benis White/Kevin Young

Monday at noon on Bibliocracy, a new interview with poet Allison Benis White, and in the second half hour, a rebroadcast with poet Kevin Young.

Allison Benis White is winner of the 2008 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize for a collection of poems titled Self-Portrait with Crayon.

Her poems have appeared in the Iowa Review, Ploughshares and Pleiades, among other journals. Honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. About her prizing-winning collection, Robert Hill Long writes, "A fugitive mother haunts these prose poems where absences are presences that 'briefly in the air crown the shape of what is no longer there.' Although Degas -- another motherless child -- provides conceptual armature for Benis White's portrayals, this book might be A Season in Hell for our times. Its descents, sudden and disorienting, exert enormous pressure; there's a narcosis of the depths in the voice, a refusal of return to mere surfaces that echoes Rimbaud. Yet White's poems are also intimate as a box of pins -- bright sharps she pricks into the map of orphan-world, to mark each site of betrayal and bewilderment." Allison Benis White reads from her work and speaks with me about the collection. Then, a rebroadcast of my program featuring poet Kevin Young, originally broadcast in January. Thanks for listening.