Multi-Verse
Multi-Verse
Episode 6: CM Burroughs on Not Being Gentle
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Episode 6: CM Burroughs on Not Being Gentle

In three “Dear Liver” poems, a grieving sister demands response

Dear Ears,

“I get to be really blunt at poetry readings,” CM Burroughs tells me at the beginning of Episode 6 of Multi-Verse. “This is a book about grief.”

Foregrounding her grief helps CM ready us—and ready herself—for poetry that reckons with acute pain. In three “Dear Liver” poems, the poet addresses her sister’s failing liver:

What can be said that will help you to understand
the values of your labor? So much depends upon the figure you cut

in the bantam cage of her body,
yourself dwarfing every other meat.

In insistent, exacting language, the “Dear Liver” poems urge the organ to function, to explain itself, to answer back.

I hope you are as moved as I am by the courage of these poems.

Thank you for listening,

Evangeline


You can find the episode by clicking on one of the buttons below, or by searching “Multi-Verse” in your podcast app.

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CM Burroughs’s “Dear Liver” poems can be found in her second poetry collection, Master Suffering, published by Tupelo Press in 2021.

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Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham. To hear more poets share and discuss the poems they don’t usually read aloud, subscribe to Multi-Verse at Spotify, Apple PodcastsPocket Casts, SoundCloud, or visit multiversepoetry.org.

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Multi-Verse
Multi-Verse
Welcome to Multi-Verse, a podcast that offers a listening space for poems usually confined to the page. With host Evangeline Riddiford Graham, poets read and discuss their writing, and unwind the multitude of meanings contained in every verse.