In this installment, Adrian Blevins reads “Infant Sorrow” by William Blake. Blevins’s The Brass Girl Brouhaha (2003) won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (1995; 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Utne Reader, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Ontario Review, Poet Lore, The Drunken Boat, Salon.com, and other magazines and journals. New work is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Rivendell, and Poetry.

William Blake, "Infant Sorrow"

My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.