What's good friends. This week we get down with getting back into the swing of "the poetry world." We also sat down with Rick Barot and got taken all the way to school. He dropped so much knowledge on art and the body and the state of contemporary American poetry. Hurry up and listen already! RICK BAROT was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002); Want (2008); and Chord (2015), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. Barot is the poetry editor of New England Review.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University.  He is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at PLU. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2020. THOSE WINTER GIN AND TONICS:  What did we know, what did we know of a gin and tonic’s potential to be a winter cocktail? Nothing! (Until we invented this version). The addition of Amaro Averna and fresh blood orange give the refreshing G&T you know and love some deeper bitter notes and a blink more sweetness. The title of the drink alludes to the famous, heartbreaking sonnet “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Ingredients: Gin (we used Seattle-based Big Gin), Tonic Water, Amaro Averna, Blood Orange REFERENCES: "Archaic torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke; "Ode to a Grecian Urn" by John Keats; “Styrofoam Cup” by Brenda Hillman; Las Meninas by Diego Veláquez; "An A to Z of Theory: Roland Barthes and Semiotics" by Andrew Robinson; The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics; "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop; VIDA