Thanks, Matthew, and congrats on the new project. I enjoyed No. 2. (Ew, that sounds terrible out of context.) Will go back for No. 1 (ditto) when I have time.
A few additional thoughts on Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "Halloween," which I hadn't encountered before your podcast:
I like the way that the identity rhyme in S1L1's "by" gives S1L4's "Goodbye" just enough extra emphasis that that word is still not too far from the surface of my mind by the time I get to "the King of the Dead" in S3L4. And on a second reading, after having found a some sort of death reference in the fourth line of the rest of the stanzas, I go back looking for the one I missed in S2, and there it is--"We sit up late, and smoke...."
(Yes, I go back to look, because I'm a visual person. Thanks for providing links on your website to all the texts you reference. Mwah!)
S3's "...real men in real boxes never do / Haunt houses" makes me think of the giant, boxlike television of my own childhood, and the anchormen and reporters (always male) who kept bringing the Vietnam War into our living room.
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