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[Brown continues]... domestic dispute. However, in the poem "Make-Believe," the speaker states, "No, I don't have a brother. . . My / mother and father had only one son. This, / My Brother, is a metaphor." Can you talk about the figure of the brother?

JB: How about I tell a very, very short story instead? Almost a year ago now, I saw Pearl Cleage give a reading (with Amiri Baraka at Albany State in Georgia!). One of the sentences in the essay she read went something like, "And the last time I called one of the black men in my neighborhood brother, he looked at me confused like I was a fool." Now what's sadder than that? You think you're looking at your brother, and he thinks he's looking at any other stranger who's passing by. I was done with the book before I heard Cleage read this, but that's the answer to your question.

AGB: In "Labor," the speaker looks back on the work he used to do helping old women mow lawns, vacuum carpets, change light bulbs, and the like. The poem ends, "I don't do that kind of work anymore. / My job is to look at the childhood I hated and say / I once had something to do with my hands." I love that. Is that the experience of the poet for you? Looking back on the childhood that you hated and crafting poetic utterances about it?

JB: Well, sometimes it's the experience you loved too, Alex! Or the experience you haven't figured your feelings out about just yet. Or the experience about which your feelings change as the years pass.

Louise Glück ends her poem "Nostos" with "As one expects of a lyric poet. / We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory." You know, she has a habit of being right about many things.

AGB: For me, one of the most striking poems in the book is "The Interrogation," which is written in seven parts. The speaker seems to have died, but he has not yet arrived in the afterlife and is in the process of being interrogated. He says, "In that world, I was a black man. / Now the bridge burns and I / Am as absent as what fire / Leaves behind . . . Who cares what color I was?" And yet, when the inquisitor asks, "And this preoccupation with color . . . What about race?" the speaker answers, "What you call a color I call / A way." Can you talk about that poem, where it came from, how it was written, and even a little, perhaps, about what it means?

JB: At some point, I became very interested in attempting to do two things at once. I wanted to write poems that do not return to their beginnings but manage to give a sense of resolution. I wanted to make a poem that would open and open and become more and more open as the reader experienced each line, and I still wanted that reader to feel she indeed was still inside the very same poem. Those were the major goals for "The Interrogation"—a series of transformations that remembered their point of origin.

When I wrote the poem, I thought a lot about the fact that when I die—if anyone ever reads my poems after I'm dead—I will have been a poet of the first half of the twenty-first century. I kept trying to figure what the poems of that century might sound like in retrospect, and what sound they might make in my voice.

The poem also has a lot to do with questions I have about race—whatever "race" may mean these days . . . I want to know where the words "brother" and "sister" went for black people and if those words in all their meanings can be retrieved.

AGB: Speaking of the twenty-first century, I read somewhere that "Colosseum," a poem that originally was published in The New Yorker, appeared to you in a dream, and that you wrote it, fully-formed, on the notes app of your phone. Can you talk about your writing process a little bit? Do you sit down and make an effort to write poems on a regular basis? Or do you wait for them to appear to you, as if in a vision?

JB: I get lines here and there, sometimes overheard, sometimes dropped from the unknown into my head. When I get them, I try to show gratitude for them by writing them down. (They often get written into my phone because my phone is with me at all times.) Once I've accumulated several of them, I try and see if any of them have anything to do with one another musically or thematically. I put them together and push. I get the lines to converse with one another until I feel I've learned something from the conversation they're having. Then I say, that's a poem.