Now, in the September 23, 2019 issue of the magazine, the New Yorker published your poem Before Winter, which we'll hear you read momentarily. First, though, is there anything you'd like us to know about this poem and how it came about? You

know, one of the things that I've been really thinking about, because Before Winter now appears in a collection called Nebraska, which just came out. I've been thinking and writing about the relationship between the lyric, the poem, the sort of eye in a poem, the positionality of a poem, and then my body inside the poem. And what does that mean? And one of the amusing moments when I sent the manuscript to the editors at the University of Nebraska Press, they sent back their editorial blurb, the copy that was supposed to go on the book. And I read it, and I wrote back, and I said, you don't want everybody to buy this book. It's like death and doom and so forth. I said, no. But then I thought, the thing about a poem, and you know what this, Kevin, is we capture a moment, and the moment is immensely true, but written and sort of locked into the frame of a poem, it suggests the kind of permanence. And it almost seems to some people will call me and say, are you okay? Are you dying? And I'm going, no, like

then, I might have been.

Okay, no, that moment is gone. Winter is over. Winter is over. Like it goes on. So that's the framework for this poem. But this poem is about me thinking about the body and mortality. Okay, here is Kameh Daha's reading his poem before winter. I imagine there is a place of deep rest, not in the resting, but after, when the body has forgotten the weight of fatigue or of its many betrayals. How unfair that once I thought it clever to blame my body for the wounds in me, the ankle, bulbous in aching, the heaviness in the thigh, and the heart of the body. The thigh and the fat, the encroachment of flesh. It is hard to believe that there are those who do not know that it is possible to let things go, to then see the expansion of flesh. It is so easy, and that knowing is a pathology. What is unknown to me is the clear day of rest. I carry a brain of crushed paper, everything unfolds as if by magic. Every spot of understanding is a miracle. I cannot take any credit for the revelation. They come and go as easily as the wind. You must know that this is a preamble to an epiphany I will record. The late morning light of October, the damp, soiled backyard, the verdant green lawn, the bright elegance of leaves thrown over it all, turning nonchalantly in the wind. And the Nebraska sky blue as a kind of watery ease, a comfort. It is all I can say. The kind one knows, even standing there, waiting for the dark to squat. That I will remember for years, but will never have the language to speak of. One of those pressures in significances that we collect and hoard. The moment lasts ten breaths, and in that silence, I imagine that I can see spirits, I can know myself, and I will not fear the betrayals of body and love and earth and the machinations of emperors and pontificates. It will be winter soon. I know my body is collecting water in its nether regions, the weight of the hibernating mammal storing everything in drowsy, slow-moving preservation. I mean, I'm losing myself to the shelter we build to beat back sorrow and the weight of our fears. I have covered thousands of miles in a few days, and I feel my parts flaking off, a shedding of yellow pieces covering the turning earth. And I'm helpless to this soft disappearing. Some call it sleep. I will stretch out and breathe.

That was Before Winter by Kame Daz.

I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry.