Elisa Gabbert is the guest. Her new book, The Self Unstable, is now available from Black Ocean. Teju Cole, writing for The New Yorker, says "I found Elisa Gabbert’s The Self Unstable a wonderful surprise. It was the most intelligent and most intriguing thing I’ve read in a while, moving between lyric poetry, aphorism, and memoir, and with thoughts worth stealing on just about every page.” And Make Magazine says "Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise." Monologue topics: the insufferably stupid anti-sunglasses stance of my early twenties, squinting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.