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

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

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.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'