Summary: On this Lit Show, Iowa Writers’ Workshop visiting professor Arda Collins discusses her book of poems, It Is Daylight. Winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and championed by Louise Glück, It Is Daylight is an abrasive, brutal, and very funny collection that speaks of modern desolation through a voice that is both ironic and afraid. Collins’s speaker inhabits kitchens and department stores in a state of holy terror, never finding God but asking all the right questions: “Can I guess what I am thinking? Can I tell you what it is?” Collins’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and A Public Space, among other venues. She studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, and is a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Glück described It Is Daylight as “a book of dazzling modernity…caustic, pithy, ruthlessly sharp witted and keen eyed.” Collins will read from her work in Iowa City at the Dey House on Thursday, December 6, at 8:00 PM. Interview by Ben Mauk.
