In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.