Jennifer Williams

I'm a shopaholic and I'm doing no by January.

So here are my rules.

I'm not buying new clothes just because something is trendy.

Hello, this is Jennifer Williams, program manager at the Scottish Poetry Library, and I'm really pleased to be sitting across from the American poet Brian Turner.

Brian is here in particular at the Stanza Poetry Festival, which is just coming up in a few days, and

actually by the time you hear this it probably will have happened already but we're so delighted that we're getting to talk to Brian and would like to say that this is recorded in association with Stanza Scotland's International Poetry Festival and would have been recorded at Stanza 2014 but due to some scheduling issues and the lucky coincidence that Brian happened to be in the poetry library today we're just going to go ahead and do it today so that's fabulous Brian is a poet and essayist and a professor

He won the 2005 Beatrice Holley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet.

And that was the first of many awards and honors for that collection, which got quite a lot of attention, I think, in the press.

And his honors since include a Lennon Literary Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowe Poetry Traveling Scholarship, all sorts of wonderful awards.

His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S.

Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise.

And

These books were published by Alice James Books in the States and by Blood X Books in the UK so actually I was delighted because I could pull them right off the shelf here in the Poetry Library and I did just want to mention as well that

Brian has a memoir coming out with Jonathan Cape this year, and so we're very pleased that he's going to be back in Edinburgh in August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, so we will make sure this is out before then, so hopefully if you haven't caught him at Stanza, you'll definitely be able to see him at the book festival this year.

But anyway, Brian, I just read Here Bullet a couple weeks ago, and I was so blown away...

I was very moved by it, and I literally did laugh and cry while reading it.

I thought it was such a powerful and really both heart-rending and exquisitely beautiful collection, and it had a wonderful kind of shape and wholeness to it.

So we're going to get to hear, I think, some poems from that collection and maybe from Phantom Note as well, and talk a little bit about them.

But I'll let you read a poem first, and then we can talk about it.

It's great to hear it in your voice.