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.

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.