By BRANDON SOM

This piece is excerpted from Brandon Som’s Tripas, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Som will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10^th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.

ANTENNA

Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau’s Orpheus copies the
broadcasts from a netherworld for verses—