Gilbert Cruz: Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the book review from the New York Times. We've all made it somehow to April. We've had our snowstorms, we have survived the cold, and now that the days are getting longer, it feels like there's more time to read. I'm certainly staying up later with the sun out longer. So, this week on the book review, we've got you covered. We are going to be talking about a few books coming out in the next couple of months that we are particularly excited about. Plus, we're going to hear from former poet laurate of the United States, Adah Leone. She is out with a new book where she makes the case for poetry. It is National Poetry Month. That is later in the show. But now, Shimana Shuma Katib is here to talk about spring books. Hello, Jima.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Hi, Gilbert.

Gilbert Cruz: We are going to talk about spring books here. We're going to talk about books that are coming out in April and May. Uh because in a couple months we are going to have a grand summer book preview episode.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Do we have books to tide us over until summer?

Gilbert Cruz: We do. Although I I I want to preface this by saying that this is a weird season. This particular spring is kind of weird for books. Like

Shimana Shuma Katib: why is that?

Gilbert Cruz: I'm going to talk about more non-fiction than I typically do on these episodes, which you know it's good. I'm I'm growing.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yeah, that's what spring is for. Well, tell us about the first book that you're excited about.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Okay, so this one is a novel, although it's kind of debatable, but it is a work of fiction. We'll start there. So, this is transcription by Ben Lerner. Ben is the author of Leaving the Ato, the the Topeka School, 1004. Uh he's very brainy and intellectual. He's also a really great poet and critic. So his work tends to be very sort of ideas driven and and the language is very beautiful and this is a very different kind of novel than what he's written before. This one is a lot looser. It's more like a sort of myasma of writing than like a a book that's motivated by plot. But um the framework is this. So, there's a middle-aged writer who's going back to Providence to interview his mentor with whom he studied in college. So, he gets to Providence. He settles into the hotel. He's like facetiming his young daughter and he drops the phone in the sink the night before he's about to do this big interview. And of course, he was planning on using like voice notes to record the the discussion. So he's like, "Okay, well now I have no backup recording device. I don't even know how to get to an Apple store because I don't have a working phone." So this is just sort of like a total anxiety spiral. Anyway, he gets to his mentor's house. He he sort of fakes it. He's like, "Yeah, I'm definitely recording our interview." Even though he's not. and his mentor is this like 90 something like German academic who like multi-hyphenate who's talking about like art and and and raising children and and historioggraphy and it's a pretty beautiful exchange between the narrator making contact with his younger self and remembering what it was like to study with this man versus the man himself now who sort of has this like whizzed he feels almost like ancient and timeless the way he talks.

Gilbert Cruz: You know what what excites me about this book? Do you know what I'm going to say?

Shimana Shuma Katib: OH, don't don't say it. Don't say it.

Gilbert Cruz: It is It is such a short book. It's so slim. It You could barely notice it if you put it on a shelf. It's like it's not even there.

Shimana Shuma Katib: No. And you know how beautiful is that actually? Slim but mighty. It really does pack a punch. and like I found it very satisfying. It's debatable whether it's a novel, but it is a very compelling piece of fiction. So that is Transcription by Ben Lerner and that is coming out on April 7th. Gilbert, what do you have?

Gilbert Cruz: I have a book by Tom Prada who I feel is someone whose books are pretty beloved. He is the guy behind Election, Little Children, The Leftovers. These are all great books in their own right that side note have all had good to great movie or TV adaptations. He is a New Jersey writer. He is writing sort of a story that is set back when he was a kid. Ghost Town is the name of his latest novel. And this is about a New Jersey writer who is remembering, you know, 50 years ago when he was 13 years old. It's the summer of 1973 or 1974 and there's unfortunately been a death in the family and he has just become a teenager. He's at loose ends. He doesn't know what to do with these feelings that he has and he takes up with a couple of older kids. One of them is, you know, an older boy who is kind of a near dwell. Uh there's another uh older girl that he starts hanging out with who tries to contact the spirit of his deceased relative with a Ouija board.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Who among us?

Gilbert Cruz: Who? Hey,

Shimana Shuma Katib: listen.

Gilbert Cruz: Did you?

Shimana Shuma Katib: Oh, yeah. Oh, Ouija boards. Yes. I was I was ready to put my faith in things sold to me by Hasbro.

Gilbert Cruz: There was nothing in my household that was more banned than a Ouija board. Oh, was it too was it too like occult adjacent?

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yes. Yes.

Gilbert Cruz: My mother is like, "Do not bring one of those into the house. Do not use it. You're going to bring the devil into our lives." So, I've actually I don't think I've ever used a Ouija board.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Oh my god.

Gilbert Cruz: And now,

Shimana Shuma Katib: what are you going to do?

Gilbert Cruz: It's been too many decades. I can't do it.

Shimana Shuma Katib: What if your kid wants one? Would you let your kid bring one into your house?

Gilbert Cruz: Absolutely not.

Shimana Shuma Katib: I am a man of reason and science.

Gilbert Cruz: Let me be ourselves. And I still would never let a Ouija board into my house. So, you know, there's a Ouija board in the story. Tom Prada is someone who doesn't write stories that have sort of like supernatural unrealistic undertones. He's generally really good at writing about situations that are sort of part comedic, part realist. He writes about schools. He writes about marriages. He writes about parenthood. You know, these things that u many of us can relate to. And and he is in reflecting mode. It's sort of like a, you know, the standby. You've have you seen Stand by Me, that movie. It's sort of like that framing. An older writer remembers an important summer in his younger years. So that is Ghost Town by Tom Prada and that is out April 28th. Jima, I know you are uncharacteristically excited to talk about non-fiction. So tell me.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yeah, I am actually. This is Okay. So, one of the books that I'm particularly excited about for April is by one of my favorite never miss by lines in terms of like international reporting. This is from life itself by Susie Hansen. I think she is just like an allstar international correspondent. She's been based in Turkey for I think over a decade at this point. and her last book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a Pulitzer finalist.

Gilbert Cruz: She writes for the New York Times magazine sometime. And she's just like the level of analysis and reporting chops is like aspirational. Like I remember this is a kind of writing that used to make me want to be a journalist. Um, so this book is really the story of Erdogan's Turkey through one working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. And this is not necessarily a totally new narrative of Turkey under Erdogan. She does make a lot of comparisons about his grabs of power and and increasing authoritarianism in the country under his tenure. Um she's very elegant in drawing the parallels between life in Turkey under this as she says canny cruel autocratic leader and other countries. These are really heady ideas and like her book is so grounded in people and life that it actually makes what could otherwise be a very abstract cultural or political analysis feel very real and very relatable. And I think that that is the best kind of journalism. I don't know why I'm feeling so proud of our profession right now.

Shimana Shuma Katib: I love it. You should you should be proud.

Gilbert Cruz: I know. I just I'm such a sucker for this stuff. It act it's so important to have access to other lives. It's why we read. Okay. Anyway, so

Shimana Shuma Katib: are you getting teareyed or do you just have something in your eye?

Gilbert Cruz: Unclear even to mwah. Okay. That is from life itself by Susie Hansen and that is coming out on April 28th.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Okay. I'm going to talk about another piece of non-fiction. This is a book called This Land Is Your Land, a road trip through US history. Uh this one is by Beverly Gage. So Beverly Gage is a name that I had not heard until a few years ago when she wrote a book called Gman. This was a book about Jay Edgar Hoover. She's a historian at Yale and it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography a few years ago. So she has a new book and as the subtitle indicates it's structured around a series of road trips. Do you know that this year is the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States? Did you know that

Gilbert Cruz: the semiquincentennial in the United States? You mean

Shimana Shuma Katib: that is what it is called?

Gilbert Cruz: That's right.

Shimana Shuma Katib: It is the semiquincentennial. And so this book is perfectly timed. There's there's a lot of books about American history coming out uh in the next 6 months. She goes to various sort of places and historical sites across this country to write about history, but to also write about how places and historical sites can tell us about history. you know, she goes to Philadelphia and to Founders Hall. She goes to Washington's Virginia, the Alamo, Fort Sumpter for a chapter on the Civil War, Montgomery for this the civil rights movement. And I believe she ends up at Disneyland, which is, as we

Gilbert Cruz: as American as it gets,

Shimana Shuma Katib: as we both know, the apotheiois of all things American. I love road trips, and I I'm I'm really into this one. I feel like I'm I'm I'm firmly in my middle-aged dad mode, reading about history, taking road trips, taking the family out. It's very possible that this would be a good book to listen to while driving.

Gilbert Cruz: While driving,

Shimana Shuma Katib: whilst driving across the country,

Gilbert Cruz: rather meta indeed.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Uh, this Land is Your Land by Beverly Gage. That book is out April 7th.

Gilbert Cruz: I have another work of non-fiction. Actually, I think is it it might be that every other book I discuss on this episode is non-fiction, which has never happened to me before. We forgive you.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Wasn't asking but

Gilbert Cruz: noted. So this title is just catnip for me. This is called prophecy.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Oh here we go.

Gilbert Cruz: Prediction power and the fight for the future from ancient oracles to AI by Cararissa. And I think this is a brilliant conceit for a book. So basically Biz she's a sort of philosopher ethicist at Oxford. She makes the point that the world we live in now, which is increasingly governed by algorithms, is really not all that different from, you know, like ancient Greece and the priestesses at Deli making predictions and prophecies and staring into orbs. And this delights me to no end because I do think that people write off foretelling prophecies, predictions as sort of like pseudocience.

Shimana Shuma Katib: You, you know, I'm both fascinated and and befuddled by your interest in astrology and all things related.

Gilbert Cruz: Um,

Shimana Shuma Katib: hit me.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. What what is what is the appeal here? You know, one of the things that was really astonishing to me reading this book is is that she makes the point everything from like whether you get a uh approved for a mortgage to like the people you see served up on dating apps. There's so much of our life that is dictated with like variable amounts of like significance, you know, like a mortgage, health care, things like that by these algorithms that we think are somehow like more rational or more reliable than human intelligence. And that might actually just not be the case. That might actually just be an expression of our desire to try to like control the future. And like AI is really no different than these old Greek ladies.

Shimana Shuma Katib: I'm curious. I'm not convinced, but I'm curious.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, you know, I Well,

Shimana Shuma Katib: I also would like to make sense of my life.

Gilbert Cruz: Did you ever go to Zolan when you were growing up in New York?

Shimana Shuma Katib: Oh, yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. See,

Shimana Shuma Katib: on the on the the boardwalk where I play land.

Gilbert Cruz: Thank you.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. All right. So, that's all I needed to hear. So this book is prophecy prediction power and the fight for the future from ancient oracles to AI by Cararissa Ves and that is coming out on April 21st.

Shimana Shuma Katib: I am going to take us back to the world of fiction very briefly to talk about a book called the witch by the French author Marie Enz translated by Jordan Stump. This particular one it is a book that was published in France in 1996. So, it's just making its way to the states here. Uh, it was recently long listed for the International Booker Prize, and that is the Booker Prize that is focused on translated fiction. This is a book about a suburban housewife who in the world of this book has magical powers, but they are very mild magical powers. She could sort of tell the near future without any algorithms. But she has two daughters who she finds are much more magically powerful than her, much more proficient at using magic than she is. But this is really a book about people, about motherhood, about marriage, about being a parent, about trying to figure out what to do when your kids are looking to bleed the nest, get out of the house. They're proven that they're more impressive than you are, which is maybe something that you have feared your whole life. I'm not speaking from experience. So it it is it has all these sort of like real human concerns with a little soup of magic.

Gilbert Cruz: You know what I love about this episode?

Shimana Shuma Katib: No one could have predicted the total role reversal that we are playing.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Not even Zultan.

Gilbert Cruz: Not even Zultan. I listen between the two of us, who is far more likely to say sup?

Shimana Shuma Katib: You.

Gilbert Cruz: Mwah.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: And I'm just happy to hear you talk about the witchier side of life. Welcome.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Um,

Gilbert Cruz: welcome. We've been waiting for you.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Uh, I I I was always going to arrive there perhaps. So, that is The Witch by uh Marie and Z. And that is out April 7th. Jim, we're going to take a break. So, coming up, we're going to have more books to look out for this spring. All right, Gilbert, I'm waiting with baited breath. What else is there?

Gilbert Cruz: We have one more book in April that we're going to talk about. Of course, there are many more books coming out in April, but uh we don't we don't have all day here. This is London Falling by Patrick Renkeefe. Have you ever heard of this uh gentleman?

Shimana Shuma Katib: Sure have.

Gilbert Cruz: He is a reporter for the New Yorker. You and I and many people probably know him best for his book Say Nothing. This is a book that came out in 2018. Uh certainly for journalists and people that love narrative non-fiction, it is it is one of the greats on our list of hundred best books of the 21st century. It came at number 19. And he is just undefeated in getting me to read books about things that I did not think I'd be interested about. I picked up mostly out of curiosity. I thought I would bounce from it in a couple chapters and Jamanna I did not. What a book.

Shimana Shuma Katib: It's so gripping. He He's an amazing writer. You know, one of my favorite books by him is The Snake Head.

Gilbert Cruz: That's the one I haven't read.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yeah, he's he's like another must-read for me.

Gilbert Cruz: He is. This is is an expansion of a piece he wrote for The New Yorker about the death of a young man in 2019 in London. This was an English kid who is pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. uh he fell in with the wrong crowd and then one night he falls from the balcony of a very fancy apartment building right on the banks of the temps. So it starts as this true crime story and then it really just expands out in every couple chapters introduces a new sort of like social layer to the whole story. So you learn about this kid and his family and the fact that he was the grandson of a famous Jewish rabbi in London. You learn about the tragedy of his death. Then you learn about the people that he got mixed up with, the Russian oligarch scene in London and the gangster scene in London. Then it expands out to talk about crime. It's just it's incredible. It's really good. And it's also about um parenthood and grief. I found myself actually sort of like very very uh taken and distraught at various points in this book. as that's gripping as anything else, but you're also with this family who is sort of grieving the death of their child and learning so many things about him that they did not know. It's it's it's just really good. And luckily for all of us, we're going to have Patrick Renke on the book review podcast next week.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Look at that. Look at that.

Gilbert Cruz: Look at that. That is London Falling by Patrick Ren Keefe. That is out April 7th. I think we have to move to May.

Shimana Shuma Katib: All right. I'm going to take the guesswork out of this for you and I'm going to tell you I have a very big large novel that I'm going to talk about.

Gilbert Cruz: It's so big.

Shimana Shuma Katib: It's so big. It's so big. It's so big. And you know, I happen to like that, but your mileage may vary. So, this is The Calamity Club by Katherine Stockett. It's been a long time since we've had a book by Katherine Stockett. She is the author of The Help. and Stockett is returning again to the south for this one, but it's a very different kind of book and a very different scope and she's grown a lot as a writer, I think. So, this one is set in 1930s Mississippi and it really has two main story lines that actually do converge pretty beautifully. So, the first one is um Meg, who is this incredibly intelligent and and pluckucky and I hate this word resilient, but she is the definition of resilient orphan. And Meg is really trying to keep Hope alive that her mom is going to come back despite everything. And this is a like a horrendous environment. She's bullied by like the orphanage director. And I mean, it's it's really quite harrowing. Very Tennessee Williams. Okay. But we love Meg. We do. And then down in the Mississippi Delta, we meet Birdie, who is this 20-something woman. She lives with her mother and her mima, and they are having some pretty dire financial problems and they are so desperate. I mean, like Birdie works, she's a bookkeeper, she's earning, but like things are just not like the math isn't mathing. And no matter how much creative accounting she's trying to do, it's they're in dire straits. So her younger sister actually had gone up to Oxford and married a banker and then basically ghosted her family. So Birdie goes up on the train to go beg her younger sister for money. And then that really sets in motion like the whole book because Birdie starts volunteering at the orphanage where Meg is. Meg's life changes. Birdie's Life Changes. This was a book that I missed when I was not reading it, right? I think I read like 700 pages in a day and a half. Brag.

Gilbert Cruz: You said it was how big?

Shimana Shuma Katib: I'm not going back to that.

Gilbert Cruz: Uhhuh.

Shimana Shuma Katib: And uh I texted a colleague of ours who had recommended it to me and I was like, "Do I like plot now?" Like like there's so much that happens in this book that I was like, "Oh my god." Like I used to think that I liked only like amorphous books with no structure, but now I think I might like things happening in books.

Gilbert Cruz: So this is a sprawling, messy, plot driven.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yeah. And like very memorable characters and there's a lot of information and and she does a lot to build out her universe. So that's The Calamity Club by Katherine Stockett and it is coming out on May 5th.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. I have a piece of fiction that I think a ton of people are going to read this spring because it is sort of like a sequel, not sequel to a giant book that came out a few years ago. That book was called The Midnight Library that was by Matt Hey. And this book, which is out at the end of May, is called Midnight Train. So, they're related somewhat. They're sort of set in the same Midnight Universe, but they're not direct sequels to each other. So, Midnight Library, did you ever read that one?

Shimana Shuma Katib: I did. Uh, so that one was about a middle-aged woman. She finds herself, as happens to some of us, in a magical library, and each book in that library takes you into a different version of your life. So, this book is a little bit different. It's about an older man. Uh, he is at the end of his life. He actually dies, which is not a spoiler. He dies before, however, he gets to whatever his version of the afterlife is. He gets on a train and that train allows him to relive moments from his past. Would you ever relive moments from your past?

Gilbert Cruz: Oh my god, no. Like, no.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Okay. I think there are many people in their life who who would like to

Gilbert Cruz: Are there episodes of your life you would like to revisit?

Shimana Shuma Katib: No. I I that seems dangerous. Seems like why would you why would you? Every moment that we have lived has led us to this point and that is where we are and it is where we are supposed to be and I'm totally fine with that.

Gilbert Cruz: Namaste.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Namaste.

Gilbert Cruz: You don't need a Ouija board.

Shimana Shuma Katib: This is Midnight Train by Matt Heg that is out May 26. I I predict that there are some people who are going to find this a little too sugar sweet, but given how popular the Midnight Library was, I can see this on the bestseller list all through the summer. Okay, I have something that is not sugarsw sweet and I have something that is all about revisiting past episodes of your life. Arguably the most dark and harrowing episodes of your life. This is a memoir called Well, I say memoir, it's a work of non-fiction. Let's let's not split hairs. Uh called Dog Days by Emily Learge.

Shimana Shuma Katib: And the story behind this book is is rather harrowing, so we should get that out of the way upfront. She and her family were on vacation in an an island around Canada, um tiny little cottage somewhere and held hostage at gunpoint for hours back in 2009. And the book opens with LeBarge. She's also like an arts critic and a an arts writer. And I think that's important for the eventual structure of this book. So the book opens with her at her family osteopath. God love Canada, man. Like I I like everybody needs an osteopath. This I believe. Okay. And he's like, Emily, why don't you get down in the position you were during the hostage situation? And she was like, "No, I don't want to do that." But what ends up happening is that she really talks about how for the last 15 years she's been sitting with like how do I tell the like good story of what happened to me? The short version that doesn't make anyone too uncomfortable. And I think one of the things that I really appreciated about this book, it's not modellin, it's not self-deprecating. It really like entirely sidesteps the sort of like trauma economy we see in a lot of cultural material right now. It's really smart. And I think because she is like made a career as a critic looking at why art works or why people decide to express themselves in a certain way, she's able to really grapple with like how we talk about traumatic events or how we talk about episodes in our own history or how we even like make sense of our own lives. I think it it's really really smart. I think this is just a book that really should not be skipped if you ask me. And that is Dog Days by Emily LeBarge coming out on May 19th.

Gilbert Cruz: I have one more book that I want to talk about. This is The Land and Its People and it is by David Sedaris.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Ah,

Gilbert Cruz: one of the most famous elf,

Shimana Shuma Katib: one of the most well-known writers of essays in America. There's an essay in here, of course, about his boyfriend.

Gilbert Cruz: You love Don't even need to say his name. No, I that's what I'm here for.

Shimana Shuma Katib: About Hugh, his boyfriend. Hugh has to have hip surgery, and David writes about that very winningly. Uh, you know, he writes about friendship as you age, loss as you age. He has had a generation of people sort of grow up with him as they've read his essays over time, and this is just going to feel right for a big portion of his audience. So, that is The Land and Its People by David Sedaris. That is out on May 26th. and Jumanna. There's so many books.

Gilbert Cruz: I know

Shimana Shuma Katib: we can't talk about them all. But what we wanted to do, I think we should do a lightning round.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Shimana Shuma Katib: And what we're going to do is mention a few more titles that are coming out in April and May. Title, author, maybe a oneline summary, if that, of the book. So,

Gilbert Cruz: you know, it used to be easier to flip a coin when we actually carried coins.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Do we want to flip this water bottle top?

Gilbert Cruz: Uh, yeah, we can. See who are you? Top or bottom?

Shimana Shuma Katib: Bottom.

Gilbert Cruz: Shimana.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Okay. So, on the calculation of volume, book four by Sve Bala. Uh, this is the sort of runaway hit that's like Groundhog Day but more existential. This actually has quite a bit of plot. Uh, so if you've been reading along up until now, like you could really strap in for some something exciting to happen on November 18th. Um, and as a fun little bit, book five is coming out later this year in November. I think they're translating them as fast as they come out.

Gilbert Cruz: I uh I really like those books.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Yeah, I do too.

Gilbert Cruz: Uh, I am going to mention Famesick. This is a memoir by Lena Dunham. I think we all know who Lena Dunham is. I believe that the show Girls is a very good show.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Never seen it.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Uh, I have another celebrity adjacent memoir. This is The Sane One by Anna Kungl. She is a co-creator and co-star of Pen 15. This is about her dad who was a manager at 7-Eleven. And I am just hooked by that alone.

Gilbert Cruz: Jamanna, I woke up this morning after having had several dreams about our 100 best books of the 21st century. And I remember that Jasmine Ward, the author Jasmine Ward, had three books on that list. Incredibly impressive. Uh she has a new book out this spring. It is called Unwitness and Respair. This is a collection of essays. The name of that book is not on witness and repair, which I thought it had been for several months. It is on wwitness and respair.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Everybody's running to the dictionary. I have John of John by Douglas Stewart. You might recognize that name because he is also the Booker Prizewinning author of Shuggy Bane.

Gilbert Cruz: I am going to mention The Things We Never Say. This is the latest by Elizabeth Stout. Stout is a very prolific author. You probably know her best for Olive KDE which won the Puliter Prize many years ago and she has another book about characters living in New England. She is a beloved author.

Shimana Shuma Katib: I'm going to talk about Yester Year by Carol Claire Burke. This is a sort of head trip of a book about Sounds interesting.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Yeah. It's about this tradife influencer who is like homesteading and she wakes up one day and her historic farmhouse that she lives in, that's also her content studio where she raises her like 12 kids. Uh she wakes up and it's 1805.

Shimana Shuma Katib: I can't wait to read that one.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, it's Yeah, I mean it it it sounds like a it's a really good concept. So, there is an episode of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. Um, and there's a joke in which the last book on Earth is a a book called Arsenio, a memoir by the former late night host Arsenio Hall. And now, 15 years later,

Shimana Shuma Katib: how many things has The Simpsons predicted?

Gilbert Cruz: 15 years later, so there actually now is a memoir by Arsenio Hall called Arcio. Uh, I love it. Uh, I love this one. This This Okay, so Five Weeks in the Country by Francine Pros, a historical novel based on the real life friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Anderson.

Shimana Shuma Katib: They were tight.

Gilbert Cruz: They were buds,

Shimana Shuma Katib: huh?

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Who knew?

Shimana Shuma Katib: I'm going to mention a book called The Ending Writes Itself. So, this is a thriller written under the pen name Evelyn Clark. And two writers came together to write this one. V E Schwab who's a very well-known genre author and Cat Clark.

Gilbert Cruz: Maria Simple who is best known as the author of Where'd You Go? Bernardet has a new novel coming out called Go Gentle.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Patricia Cornwell is a very well-known mystery writer. She has written a bunch of novels starring K. Scarpetta who is sort of her her star character. She's a forensic pathologist. They actually just made a series starring Nicole Kidman that just came out. British Cornwell has a memoir about her life and her early career and that is called True Crime. Jamanna, that was so many books.

Gilbert Cruz: So many.

Shimana Shuma Katib: As always, thank you for coming on.

Gilbert Cruz: Thank you for having me.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Mixing it up here with me.

Gilbert Cruz: Non-fiction. I don't even know who I'm going to leave this studio a changed person.

Shimana Shuma Katib: This is your non-fiction year.

Gilbert Cruz: After the break, former poet laurate Adah Leone.

Adah Leone: Truth be told, anytime I begin to write anything these days, my whole life flashes before my eyes. Do I want to break something or do I want to mend something or simply try to carve out a small place to breathe? Then if I'm lucky, lines of poems I love start to move through me.

Gilbert Cruz: Last May, Ada Leone gave a speech at the Library of Congress. It was her closing lecture, her final talk as the 24th United States Poet laurate. And in that speech, she made a case for why poetry matters.

Adah Leone: Would it be an exaggeration to say that poetry saves lives? Maybe, maybe not. During my tenure as the poet laurate, I've come to realize that not only are people hungry for poetry, language, and connection, but that for so many people around the world, it serves as a much needed lifeline already.

Gilbert Cruz: That speech has now been published as a book titled Against Breaking on the Power of Poetry. Given that April is National Poetry Month, we had to have Ada on to talk about her speech as well hopefully as to read us a poem. Ada, welcome to the book review.

Adah Leone: Thank you so much for having me.

Gilbert Cruz: Ada, I'm going to ask you a question that I hope you do not take offense at at the beginning here u because you write about it in your book and it has to do with the fact that I don't think many Americans know what the poet laurate is. M what did you think this honor involved and what did you learn in the doing about what the poet laurate actually has to do?

Adah Leone: Yeah, the poet laurate is a position named by the librarian of congress and you're asked to promote poetry and the library and put poetry in the public sphere but really the role is whatever you make it. I think that's why each poet laurate like Joy Harjo Trace K Smith one Filipe Eera everyone has done such a different job because there is really only two obligations. The one is to do an opening reading at the Library of Congress and a closing lecture at the Library of Congress.

Gilbert Cruz: You just named the three people who occupied the chair before you. Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, uh, Juan Filipe Herrera. Um, did you reach out to them and say like, "Hey guys, I don't know what to do here. Can you give me some advice?"

Adah Leone: I did. I did. Um, specifically to Tracy and to Joy and, um, Joy specifically told me to clear any ideas I had about the laurate ship and really make it my own. And Tracy said, "Always speak through poetry."

Gilbert Cruz: That when you feel lost, find poems and write poems. And that was really also amazing advice.

Gilbert Cruz: What did you learn about how poetry is regarded or perceived in America over your years as as the poet laurate? We're here. It's National Poetry Month. It's wonderful that it gets a whole month um in which we can try try to focus a little more on it. But you went across this large land of ours and encountered people all the time and your job was to be sort of the avatar for poetry. Um did you come away feeling more optimistic about it? Did you come away feeling like the scales had been ripped from your eyes in some way? Tell me about this.

Adah Leone: You know, it's funny because every study I see says that we are reading less um as a nation and that poetry readership is down. But my experience in the wild, if you will, uh is that people are reading poetry and writing poetry everywhere. Everywhere I went, someone was doing a project. Someone was teaching kids to write poems and putting them on rocks and putting them around trees. Someone was um having people take pictures and write poems toward the pictures. There were so many collaborations that I felt really inspired and my job seemed to switch from being someone who was supposed to be out there making a case for poetry and instead I had this moment where I got to receive what people's experience with poetry was and it was very deep.

Gilbert Cruz: There was a a a paragraph from your speech from this book. Can I do you mind if I read it back to you and just to get some further thoughts on it? Um you said and then you wrote in this book and there are certainly days that I do not want to write a poem. Why is that? Because there are days when I don't want to feel or rather I only want to feel safe and soft things. Poetry does the work of opening us up to our feelings. And it's not surprising that it can often make people cry, even those of us who very much wish not to cry. It's my belief, this is the part I found very interesting, that this is why adults often think poetry is for children, not because they want it to be taught to children, but because they think that children have more of an emotional range. I'd argue this is exactly why poetry needs to be more integrated into the lives of adults. There are like five different things to ask about here. Um, but I was particularly interested in why you think adults associate uh or some adults associate poetry more with children um when as you were just describing it really can encompass the full range of adult emotion in ways that other forms maybe can't. You know, I love that you read that passage because um first of all, I'm glad it still rings true to me. Um but the uh the moment that I be was named the poet laurate, the first thing that people asked me was, "Oh, so are you going to work with children?"

Adah Leone: And every time I talk about poetry, there is for people who are unfamiliar with poetry, the first thing they ask is about whether or not it's poetry for kids. And I realized it was a way of distancing themselves from poetry. And it made me wonder if perhaps we feel as if as adults we aren't allowed to access all of our emotions. That that kind of vulnerability or rawness or the full spectrum of human emotions which are a lot. Uh we're not supposed to access that. We're not supposed to delve into that. We're supposed to be stoic. We're supposed to be brave. We're supposed to be courageous. And um we're supposed to get our job done, right? We're supposed to go to work and and keep a smile on our face. And when someone asks us how we are, we're supposed to say fine.

Gilbert Cruz: You just described my morning.

Adah Leone: Whereas if you ask a kid Yeah. Exactly. And if you ask a kid, they'll say, "Well, this is this is the way I'm feeling." or you know and so we we sort of trained that out of us and I think that's why I was so adamant that a lot of the work I wanted to do was of course included children but that it was primarily for adults.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm curious how much of what you just described do you think is this sort of social training? Um, and how much of it is, I don't know, maybe some inherent like human desire not to want to engage with emotion uh more than you need to.

Adah Leone: Yeah. Um, I had a friend who once said he was going through a hard time and he said, "I can't even listen to music right now because every time a song comes on, I burst into tears." M and I really relate to that and so I think there are times where art we know what it does it is supposed to open us it's supposed to pierce us right so sometimes there's uh there's places where we feel at least for me at least in my reality I know there are times when I don't want to read a poem because I know that it will make me weep I can see the first line you and it's like driving towards something you think no no no

Gilbert Cruz: no I don't I don't want to feel that right now and I think there's a great permission to do that but also remember that sometimes that breaking open and that feeling and that grieving or that openness to wonder or joy that's really important and we don't heal and we don't continue if we don't grieve. And a lot of times the poems that hurt us are the poems that actually give us joy, remind us of joy, remind us of sweet things cuz that can that can pierce us too. I remember when um I was grieving this death of my stepmother and um the deli when I lived in New York, the deli downstairs, uh there was a wonderful couple that worked there and I walked in and this woman had said she was so nice and she just said, "How are you? I haven't seen you in a And I had been home. It was a home death. And so I'd been home um helping my stepmother die. And the sweetness of this woman behind the counter just destroyed me. I had, you know, gone to work. I had ridden the subway. I'd kept it together. And then this kindness, you know, this human kindness just wrecked me. And I think poetry is a lot like that interaction where sometimes it just gives you permission to take a deep breath. And you'd be surprised at how many of us are walking around holding our breath.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Well, Aydah, I am going to give you permission to take a deep breath. And hopefully you're going to give us all permission to take a deep breath um by reading a poem.

Adah Leone: I'd be so happy to.

Adah Leone: This is a poem that um I feel like was it was given to me by a tree. And every time I say that out loud, I think, oh, this is what people think poets say.

Gilbert Cruz: I just thought the same thing

Adah Leone: like, oh, a tree gave me this poem. You know, I can just hear collective eye rolling and this is this is who we are. So, um you know, we're here to stay. instructions on not giving up.

Adah Leone: More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crab apple tree. More than the neighbors almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains. It's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's bobbles and trinkets leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath. The leaves come patient plotting a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us. A return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.

Adah Leone: Fine, then I'll take it, the tree seems to say. A new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm. I'll take it all.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Aydah, I'm very uncomfortable with the with the feelings I'm feeling right now.

Adah Leone: You're just going to have to take it all. You're just going to have to feel it, my friend.

Shimana Shuma Katib: This is not what I signed up for. Um, can I ask you possibly to read another one?

Adah Leone: Yeah, I'd be so happy to.

Shimana Shuma Katib: Thank you.

Adah Leone: How do you want to feel?

Shimana Shuma Katib: Uh, I you know, I'm putting my my heart in your hands here, so you choose. Okay. Um, this is a poem that I wrote thinking about language and poetry and so I wanted to give it a really obnoxious title so I called it literary theory.

Adah Leone: You succeeded.

Adah Leone: Literary theory. Somehow the word allow is in the word swallow. And in swallow two wholly different meanings. One to take in through the mouth and another what we call the common winged gnat hunter who is in all probability somewhere near us. Now once I thought if I knew all the words I would say the right thing in the right way. Instead, language becomes more brutish. Blink twice for the bird. Blink once for tender annihilation. Who knows what we are doing as we go about our days lazily choosing our languages. Some days my life is held together by definitions. Some days I read the word swallow and all my feathers show.

Gilbert Cruz: Adah Leone, are you just used to like reading poems and seeing people in the audience like get teeyed and stuff?

Adah Leone: Well, yeah. And the worst is I'm And then I attend poetry readings all the time and then I weep. So, yeah. I I love it.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh, boy. You got to stay hydrated.

Adah Leone: Oh, it's true. I'm always drinking water. I cry all the time. and my superpower is crying and laughing at the same time.

Gilbert Cruz: Um, this was great. Thank you very much for joining the book review to remind us all of the joy and value of poetry. This has been a delight.

Adah Leone: Thank you so much for having me.

Gilbert Cruz: The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Lissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Alicia Baichu. Special thanks to Dalia Hadad and Paula Schuman. We want to hear what you think about the show. Send us an email at thebookreview@nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.