Brian Tierney and Charif Shanahan on Poetry as a Verb, Truth vs Fact, and Love

This week, Charif Shanahan continues asking the Big Questions, this time with Brian Tierney, who joins us from Oakland, California. They get into poetry as a way to pursue truth, living in a time of ruin, and more. We hear poems from Tierney’s debut collection, Rise and Float (Milkweed Editions, 2022), as well as poems from the May issue of Poetry. In keeping true to Tierney’s complex poetics, this new work emerges from a world of dystopian exhaustion while also insisting on love.