Podcast Episode 22: The Watcher on the Wall

read by

Hi everyone, I’m Catherine Rockwood, and today on the Reckoning Magazine Podcast I’m going to be reading “The Watcher on the Wall” by Rebecca Bratten Weiss. And this poem is featured in Reckoning 6, which we are very proud of and which hope you will pick up or survey.

So the way we’d like to order the podcast is, first I’m going to tell you a little bit about Rebecca, and then I’m going to say a few words about what we really loved about this poem when it came through in the submissions, and then I’m going to read you the poem. Okay, so here goes.

(Rebecca’s bio appears below.)

So on to some thoughts about the poem itself. Here I would just say that what we loved about Rebecca’s poem was its clarity and anger, its willingness to fully engage with difficult human relationships with which and by means of which we try to understand the enormous danger and uncertain outcomes of environmental destruction. When climate communicators talk about the need to face difficult things, well, you’ll see what this poem does with that. It embodies the process of facing difficult things in a way we found both grave and uncanny, disturbing and galvanizing. And we hope you agree.

“The Watcher on the Wall” by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Author: Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Rebecca Bratten Weiss is a journalist, editor, and freelance academic residing in rural Ohio. Her creative work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Two Hawks Quarterly, Presence, Connecticut River Review, Shooter, New Ohio Review, Gyroscope Review, The Seventh Wave, and Westerly. Her collaborative chapbook Mud Woman, with Joanna Penn Cooper, was published in 2018, and her collection Talking to Snakes by Ethel Zine and Micro Press in 2020. She is a two time Pushcart nominee, and winner of the Helen Schaible Memorial Sonnet Contest, Modern category.
A white, female-presenting person with straight, copper-red hair in a dark blue sleeveless top stands against a hedge.

Author: Catherine Rockwood

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts with her family. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in HAD, Stone Circle Review, Moist Poetry Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. Catherine’s poetry chapbooks, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, and And We Are Far From Shore: Poems For Our Flag Means Death, are available from the Ethel Zine Press.   

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *