This is a special bonus clip excerpted from EPISODE 14 in which art critic Shana Nys Dambrot interviewed poet, historian, and writer Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the Poet. Their full conversation, which is linked in the show notes, is wide ranging and beautiful, and we highly recommend listening to the entire thing, or watching it on YouTube, but we couldn’t resist pulling out Mike’s poem as a stand-alone. Mike and Shana's full bios, as well as Shana's five places interview, are linked in the show notes.
Discover more of Mike’s work via his instagram, and Linktree, and find other relevant links in the show notes for his original interview with art critic Shana Nys Dambrot (E14). For Shana’s bio and her Five Places L.A. interview, check out Episode 12, here. “Los Angeles A to Z” is a poem included in Mike Sonksen’s beautiful tribute to Los Angeles, “Letters to My City”, the second edition of which was just published by Writ Large Press in 2023. “The poems and essays in Letters to My City combine two decades of field experience, research, personal observations, and stories told to the author, Mike Sonksen, a third-generation Los Angeles native, by his grandfather and other family members, to interrogate all sides of Los Angeles, its streets, its people, its neighborhoods, as a means to examine the postmodern metropolis.”