Tomas Q. Morin is a soft-spoken poet with an esthetic that is loud and clear. He revels in the connections between reality and the fantastic. Some of his work recalls that of Philip Levine and James Dickey, but Morin has his very own style. He provides dulcet decibels for sore ears. As such, he’d be a perfect new voice for April's National Poetry Month.

One poem he reads here about a doll brings together a tailor’s dummy purchased at a shop and the death of Morin’s grandmother. He interweaves details about his grandma’s double mastectomy and the poem’s speaker all but falling in love with the doll one night and working on her body like an artist, altering her shape.

Another poem deals with the first dog to die in space, a pooch named Laika whom the Soviets installed aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957. Morin invents all sorts of things Laika might have done had she lived a normal dog’s life on earth.

I’ve long admired KUT as a public radio station with an innovative program director. From the University of Texas in Austin, KUT reaches way beyond the Lone Star State to listeners far and wide.

I’m loath to criticize a segment as listener-friendly as this installment of KUT’s semi-regular series, Portrait of the Artist.

I only wish Morin weren’t quite so chatty in his between-poem remarks. Two poems in nearly 11 minutes strike me as a bit meager. As interested as I was in Morin’s background—his schooling, his attempts to regain a knowledge of Spanish he lost as a thoroughly assimilated Chicano—I would have welcomed hearing at least one more poem read by him in his almost mesmerizing quiet manner.