Beauty's where you find it, not just where you bump and grind it, the girls discover.

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Notes:

The documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is a 91-minute biographical film directed by Sasha Waters that explores the life, career, and private world of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. You can watch it on YouTube for free here.

Read Mary Oliver's essay "Bird" here and her poem "Summer Day" here.

Janna Levin's book How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space is a popular 2023 book that mixes memoir and visionary science. Levin is a leading astrophysicist. Find her online at https://jannalevin.com

Mark Doty's essay, "Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?" which also features Szymborska's "Photograph from September 11th."

Patricia Hampl's most recent books are the nonfiction book The Art of the Wasted Day (2019) and It's Come to This, which pairs her nonfiction text with illustrations. The book itself is 36 pages, bound with quarter yellow leather over illustrated paper-covered boards, and enclosed in a cloth clamshell box with a paper spine label. Only 75 copies were printed; the copy I found online retails for $1500.

Watch a short interview and reading by Tyree Daye here.

Read more about Patrick Radden Keefe's book London Falling

You can read the beginning of Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow in the New Yorker here.