So it’s come to this. I’ve begun a podcast. Welcome to Drunk as a Poet on Payday, where we celebrate new books of poetry and hear the authors read their poems and talk about their work.
Our first episode features Cynthia Marie Hoffman, whose new book, Exploding Head, is on fire and lighting up the poetry world. A memoir-in-verse about growing up and living as an adult with OCD, “which manifests primarily in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world.”
Find the show on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Google (pending), Transistor, and many other podcast hosts.
Hoffman is the author of three previous books of poetry, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize from Persea Books. Her poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Lake Effect, Blackbird, The Believer, and The Los Angeles Review, among many others. Additionally, she is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board.
Pick up a copy of Exploding Head here. (Or, you know, the other place.)
Check out some of Hoffman’s writing about the book in places like Time, LitHub, and Chicago Review of Books.
Future Episodes:
Episode 2: Jesse Nathan / Eggtooth
Episode 3: Lisa Ampleman / Mom in Space
Stay turned for episodes featuring JL Conrad and Ross White….
Reading Recommendations:
If you don’t know the poems of Anthony Hecht, or even if you do, it’s a great time to be alive. A new collected poems has just been published, containing his last poems, as well as the full text of his first book, A Summoning of Stones, which was only gathered in part in earlier collections. On top of that, there is the excellent biography of Hecht, Late Romance, by David Yezzi out in the world.
Other ways to follow us:
Website: http://drunkasapoet.com
Instagram: @drunkasapoetonpayday
BlueSky: drunkasapoet.bsky.social
TikTok: @jgraypoet
About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and the soon-closing Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon
Just loved this interview. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s work is powerful. I appreciated the mix of talk re craft (how she arranged the arc of her manuscript as well as her choice of prose poetry vs line poetry) and approach to her subject matter (when she felt ready to write about her experience with OCD, when she relies on her own experience and when she chooses to include research in her process). Ms. Hoffman says writing about OCD may not have helped her but it sounds like writing about the angel she’s encountered since childhood was unwittingly helpful.