Hi friends! April is National Poetry Month, and this year I’m embarking on something new: Anonymous Grocer, an audio adventure in backwards poetry.

Anonymous Grocer is a 30-day experiment in sound poetry. Each day of National Poetry Month, a hand-picked published poem, many of which you will know quite well, will be read by yours truly, word-for-word in a backwards sequence.

Along this monthlong ride, we’re gonna majorly queer up word order, deconstruct syntax, and experience some new and old favorite poems like never before. Unscrew your head one or two times, and prepare to create space for the unexpected, the dissonant, the oracular.

If you’re interested in receiving the daily Grocer poem (audio and transcription) delivered to your email, let me know in the comments or DM me, and I’ll add you to the daily email list!

Otherwise, you can always check out every episode here on ccfinch.com (I’ll be weekly updating the website with the episodes.)

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[And now for some fun monologues:]

Why Grocery? Easy. Words are food – I mean, I could surely mush them around and around in my mouth for hours, days, jovial lifetimes. Words — the sound, the feel of them — provide nourishment and pleasure and curiosity – just rolling around, experimenting.

The Anonymous bit is for the hunger pang (pain?) of the unknown. From the backwards recitation, you may experience nonsensical language, comprehension difficulty, utter weirdness and surprise. I encourage you to embrace it all – like tasting a new food for the first time or releasing yourself from quotidian labels – let the sounds of the poems-in-reverse slide onto your ear tongues, sound melting into you.

Release yourself from the need to understand. Just eat, just trust, just open yourself to the fullness of our strange concert.

Happy Poetry Month, y’all!