Episode 156: The Challenge/Pleasure Ratio

Kathy puts the kibosh on our introductory weather ramblings, Slushies. Instead we’re sharing what makes us grateful. Seems like, with our combined love of coffee, we’re keeping the baristas in business. Aside from java, Tobi’s thankful for poetry podcasts (not just ours), including Poem Talk from Penn Sound. Lisa’s grateful for the public library that gives her free access to novels like The Copywriter by Daniel Poppick . Eric appreciates his students. And we reveal the secret behind why we’re not on YouTube. Of course we’re thankful to YOU for listening, Slushies, and to the writers who allow us to discuss their work, like today’s featured poet, Sarah Brockhaus. In the first poem, “Still Here,” Eric notes the honest intertwining of the writing and teaching life. And Tobi remarks how the flexible nature of the English language, with its ability to shift nouns into verbs, is on display in the poem. The poem’s nimble leaps reminds Jason of Richard Siken ’s valuable advice to “focus less on the lyric leap and more on the lyric landing.” The second poem challenges us with its frequent use of enjambment and caesura, but the ratio of challenge to pleasure is high. We end with Jason’s sage advice on how to structure a submission. Thanks, as always, for listening, Slushies! At the table: Eric Baker, Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (Sound Engineer) Author Bio: Sarah Brockhaus is an MFA student at Louisiana State University. She is a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and her poems are published or forthcoming in Guernica, The National Poetry Review, American Literary Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Website: sarahbrockhaus.com Social Media: Instagram: @sarahb._23 Blue Sky: scbrock.bsky.social Still Here I try to teach my students to exist outside themselves and they email about double spacing and panic apologize for 12:01 submissions and I want to see them and say we’re real people, all of us, we’re real. Do you see? But I stare at my wall for hours and it means nothing. I’ve been losing things in dreams, each shape afterimages on my lids and I can’t see the space around enough to place them. Perhaps there never was a hairbrush, a magnet in the shape of Louisiana, a letter written springs ago. Fingers trace the handwriting by heart like revision, same stories and script but the wrong heart. I’m translating farther and farther from the origin. My nails grow too long. I imagine myself bodiless, avoid reflections. I hold still and myself. There are eight taxidermied ducklings at the craft fair. So like life and so still. I want to break them from the cage, find a way for their bodies to hold again. Phonagnosia A wasp taps again against the window. I imagine the hollow clunk communicating other causes: an acorn slouching from a branch into a pool. A man’s head, drunk, hitting the wall lullabically, my hand slid into the space between skin and cinder -block, how one might protect a baby’s soft skull from a corner. I try to tell the wasp I am not home and everything from my body sounds human. To sleep I make lists on the uselessness of language: the phrase how are you? and how your doing well is a wall I trace my own name on like tally marks, how the sea swallows song and estranges it, how without air I am voice -less, how I haven’t trained my ear to echo locate, and can’t even vibrate some signal through a pane of glass, can’t replay what you said years ago in any voice but the one inside me, that won’t go, won’t sound like anyone I know.

You can listen to Episode 156: The Challenge/Pleasure Ratio online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 156: The Challenge/Pleasure Ratio is an episode from Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile by Painted Bride Quarterly.

This episode is 43:01 long.

This episode was published on May 12, 2026.

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