The world comes to us in fragments and shards. Whatever stories we shape from our days, we're always dealing with gaps, blank-spots, and blackouts - and in handling all these breakages, we are, at all times, so incredibly intimate with sharp edges, the unending knife-like moments of failure and joy in our lives.

Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have.

Well, we're all going to die, so mortality is a part of writing and life.

Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

I've never thought of my poems as violent. Violence, to me, has so much negativity attached to it - maybe that's my trouble with the word. But ferocious - indeed, I'll take it. And yes, poetry does need a bit of ferocity. Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity - the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

I found it incredibly challenging to write clear prose that had the dynamism that I wanted.