Rachel Zucker speaks with writer Sabrina Orah Mark (author of The Babies and Tsim Tsum) right before the first night of Passover. They talk about Judaism, surrealism, Claudia Rankine and Kenneth Koch, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, being good at being pummeled, the prose poem, the kabbalistic concept of tsim tsum, the Holocaust, Jewish identification, what makes a Nazi a Nazi, empathy, Trump, slavery, living in Georgia, the commodification of trauma, teaching outside the academy, “the crying room,” writing fiction, using “I” again, raising an interracial Jewish family in the South, privilege, safety, fear, and believing and not believing in healing.
EXTRA RESOURCES FOR EPISODE 33Books by Sabrina Orah MarkTsim Tsum (Saturnalia, 2009)
The Babies (Saturnalia, 2004)
Other Books and Authors Mentioned in the EpisodeClaudia Rankine
Kenneth Koch
John Donne
Rachel Zucker’s chapbook Annunciation
Coetze’s Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin, 2010)
Josh Bell
Reginald McKnight
Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness by Jane Lazarre
Bruno Schulz
Other Relevant LinksMagritte’s The Healer
Emmett Till
Controversy over the Emmett Till painting at the Whitney
“The Poet as Collector,” Sabrina’s lecture on trash
Rachel’s birth poem that mentions tsim tsum
Episode 81: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 2
Episode 80: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 1
Episode 79: Christine Larusso
Episode 78: Anne Boyer
Episode 77: Tina Chang
Episode 76: Ada Limón
Episode 75: Victoria Chang
Episode 74: Rachel Zucker's SoundMachine
Episode 73: Jennifer Croft (Translation Series Ep. 3)
Episode 72: Ilya Kaminsky
Episode 71: Mira Jacob
Episode 70: Alicia Jo Rabins
Episode 69: Live Reading with Brown, Joseph, Meitner Parker, Pico, Tolbert, and Yanyi
Episode 68: Live Reading w/ Calvocoressi, Falkner, Gay and Mark
Episode 67: John Biewen
Episode 66: Sarah Gambito
Episode 65: Hillary Frank
Episode 64: John Keene (Translation Series, Ep. 2)
Episode 63: Juliana Spahr
Episode 62: Khadijah Queen
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
50 Tastes Of Gray
Dear Alice | Interior Design
Spider-Man Crawlspace Podcast
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
The Magnus Archives
The Moth