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 41: Danez Smith
Episode 40: Kaveh Akbar
Episode 39: Erika L. Sánchez
Episode 38: Sharon Olds
Episode 37: Sheila Heti and Sarah Manguso
Episode 36: Dialogue Arts Project
Episode 35: Aracelis Girmay
Episode 34: Dr. Joshua Bennett
Episode 32: Laynie Browne
Episode 31: Carmen Giménez Smith
Episode 30: Sarah Vap
Episode 29: Molly Peacock
Episode 28: Poems for Mother's Day
Episode 27: Rita Dove
Episode 26: Alice Notley
Episode 25: Ross Gay
Episode 24: Julie Carr
Episode 23: Morgan Parker
Episode 22: Undocupoets 2 — Javier Zamora, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Janine Joseph
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