House Lions is Wesleyan’s resident poetry podcast. To hear featured poets read their poems live and talk about their work, check out the House Lions weekly featured reader. Look for information about live recording sessions in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and a new featured poet every week.  For more information, or to express interest in being on the show, shoot an email to sknittle@wesleyan.edu.

This week’s poet: Audrey McGlinchy.

Audrey McGlinchy’s poetry reads as an encyclopedia of angles, as if, to write a poem, McGlinchy holds an object up to light, submerges it in a good conductor like water, and drags it around with her until it open itself by degrees. Her work is both stoic and intensely sad, commemorating both the range of possible expressions and celebrating the fact of human reaction.

Audrey McGlinchey '11

Audrey  likes to both frolic and write, sometimes even in her hometown of Horsham, Pennsylvania. When she was 10, she wrote a poem about having the chicken pox.  While in high school she attended two summer writing workshops at Brown University and Susquehanna University and placed second in the school-wide poetry contest two years in a row. Her work can now be seen in several publications on the Wesleyan campus and on her desk in her dorm room. She spent the past summer teaching creative writing to children in Ghana. She thinks that their poetry rocks way harder than hers.

Poem and podcasts after the jump.

In the tasting of it all, there is famine

I.

We have been smuggling soft lawns into the floor. There we have hole, drain, the holes that make up the drain. I have questions for you. You tell me to write them in the blades, using the soft skin of a stomach. I find a female’s, use it for the give.

II.

I am seeping by clawing; seeping into the gaps between root and ground. You have a narrow windpipe and therefore cannot play the trumpet, but there is not much else you cannot do. With this, I throw you ductility and my voice. You blow, sputter, blow.

III.

Silence is the crippling part of a gasp. I have saved two pennies for you, but they are no longer for you. A tree is round, if only to form a knot, an anti-conjure, a call.

To hear Audrey talk about her experiences writing everywhere from Wesleyan to Ghana and to hear her read several of her poems, listen below:

Interview with Audrey[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/audreyfull.mp3″] Poem: “In the tasting of it all, there is famine” [argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/famine.wav”] Poem: “In Comfort of the Cyclically Comfortless” [argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/father.wav”] Poem: “Sonnet” [argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/sonnet.wav”]