Post Poet Pop, Episode 26 features the bike commuting, softball coaching, Oakland A's loving poet and scholar, Jared Stanley. He is the author of So Tough (Saturnalia Books, 2024), and it's that title of Jared's book that made me think about the always-reaching descriptor that the word "tough" is. So Tough is a sequential, set-in-octet book that appears gentle, in a visual sense, but doesn’t waste a speck of anything, as Jared's work has always done, in its devotion to the ecological. He writes, in one of the poems you will not hear him read on this episode, “able bodied youths throw their muscle at smoke, It’s sunday” … What durability, how fibrous, and yet all that wasted potential that’s become an everyday thing but, here, it's also a supposed day of rest—all those firefighters trying to stop mountains of wind and heat. Is the world tough to withstand humanity or are we tough to endure climate change? Who can tell? It’s all so very absurd.

Find out more about Jared's work at JaredStanleyInfo.Wordpress.com, and you can grab a copy of So Tough from Saturnalia Books, or wherever books are sold.

All poems are performed by Jared Stanley and all the author’s poems discussed are published in So Tough (Saturnalia Books, 2024). The poems are the property of the author and the publisher(s) listed. The song played during the introduction is “Sunday Afternoon” and is performed by The True Loves. Please support their work.

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