Kevin Young

And he did them by hearing the poem read to him, much how the poem was intended, Dante's poem,

is an oral poem, you know, and to hear them aloud, and then he would make a illustration for each canto, which I think is such a beautiful kind of flow in the moment and improvisational way to work.

And so I set about kind of doing that myself, along with Robin Costa Lewis, another poet we divided hell in half.

And, you know,

I very much, it helped me figure out a form for these poems that were not poems yet.

You know, they were sort of ideas for poems.

And suddenly, in a burst, they came in the ways that you're talking about.

The Descent, Beyond is another poem.

They're poems that really think about, you know, the grove of suicides and that powerful part in Dante where he's in this grove and plucks a leaf off of one of the suicides who end up in this grove.

And it's painful.

And that kind of

moment of metaphor, but also I think of empathy that Dante has.

Even if in his cosmology, they're among the damned, there's an amazing sympathy and empathy there that I want to write through and about.

And Dante just gave me a sounding board.

He was my Virgil in some way leading me through these poems.

And then I ended up without telling anyone

continuing into purgatory and into paradise, which I call Werewolf Hill and Resurrection City.

They're maybe not the paradise of Dante.

There's not as much light, but in a way, they were trying to figure out what redemption looks like now.

Well, it's a form both influenced by Dante, like all of poetry pretty much in the West is, and also at the same time was influenced by some previous books of mine, including Brown and Stones, which were my last two books.