If I'm listening, everything is there
Jerika Marchan on SWOLE
O, subscriber! O, what a sweet little treat of an interview I’ve rustled up for this week!
You will be as pleased as I am, I’m sure, to learn the identity of the pod’s inaugural poet: JERIKA MARCHAN! Of whose polyvocal & piquant & porpoiseful collection SWOLE I will remain forever and ever a huge fan!
Jeri is a New Orleans native, and SWOLE is the story of the city’s reaction to 2005’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina as told through a sweltering ensemble cast, from high school girls to FEMA pamphlets to Kanye West’s immortal remarks on national television. It’s an ecopoetic YAWP and a must-read for anyone curious how verse can form a record of our bruised world (and help build a better one).
![The text of [SWELL], a poem from Jerika Marchan's SWOLE. You can listen to an audio recording of Jeri reading this poem aloud below.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ju9M!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd94471c7-b556-4b81-8c16-c36c39112a52_1658x1847.jpeg "The text of [SWELL], a poem from Jerika Marchan's SWOLE. You can listen to an audio recording of Jeri reading this poem aloud below.")
As for Jeri herself, she’s like if James Joyce was an online millennial woman who’s also a hyper-porous neo-radio, an effervescent somatic data collector, and a heuristic meme-generator. Over the course of our conversation about her collection and its city, Jeri had to perform the Heimlich on her large, beautiful cat, which endeared him to me even more — I hadn’t realized such a thing was possible! And then, as Jeri was reading from SWOLE, her phone alarm went off: she needed to leave immediately to catch a shuttle to a boat to see some alligators1.
“We’ll fix it in post!” she said of our punctuated interview, grabbing a pair of sunglasses well suited to Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road era. But I didn’t, and not just because I don’t have video editing software on my laptop. It’s because the below footage captures all the spontaneity, wit, and surreal hilarity that inevitably follows from a conversation with Jeri, and I’d hate for any of it to be reduced to scrapped pixels in some digital dustbin.
For those of you who want to hear Jeri finish her reading of [SWELL], you’re in luck: audio recording below! Hope you enjoy, and don’t forget to order your copy of SWOLE!
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Though it may be the latter half of April, you still have time to upgrade! If you become an annual paid subscriber this April ($50/year), you’ll automatically be upgraded to a Founding Member, which will entitle you to:
Two free gift subscriptions!
One signed and inscribed book of your choice, mailed to you for free!
And if you are so gracious as to become a founding member ($80/year; bless u!), you’ll get one 45-minute Zoom writing coaching session with me!
Stay tuned for Extra Essay 2, which will launch my Unpopular Opinions criticism series. First up: Andrea Long Chu’s Authority.
Happy Spring :)
I promise this is really true and not me doing some offensive New Orleans-stereotyping.