A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

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

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

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