Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.
Today, Robert Ostrom reads a poem from his newest release The Youngest Butcher in Illinois. He is also the author of two chapbooks, To Show the Living and Nether and Qualms. He lives in Queens and teaches at the City University of New York and Columbia University.
Click the soundcloud link below to experience a poem from The Youngest Butcher in Illinois as read by Robert Ostrom.
The word on The Youngest Butcher in Illinois:
Here is some sorcery, not necessarily explicable. Here is the invisible; Robert Ostrom traffics in it. The poems of The Youngest Butcher in Illinois are some of the most gifted I’ve ever read.
“We are not safe,” he writes—but nor would we ever, for a moment (here) want to be. There’s something oddly shy about the way these poems comport themselves, but the imagination is brazen with yearning. The authority of craft is bracing: the lines are sutured but there are no scars.
The dark, passionate, miniature universe Ostrom has composed is seductive and whimsical. This is a new voice—edgy, stricken with attentiveness, soft-spoken, numinous. Take him at his word.
—Lucie Brock-Broido
*Lifted from Goodreads with love
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