Cynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heart’s territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinson—sharpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of love—the broken fragments, the fallen leaves—and puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch out—she’s driving down your street.

I don't know anything about chemistry, but I know that there's a whole world of chemistry, of professional chemists. They have their prizes, they have their publications, they have their work. Just because I don't know about it, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. A lot of people say, "Isn't poetry in trouble today?" Or: "Nobody really reads poetry anymore." And I say, "You're crazy." There's a huge world of poetry out there. You may not know about it, but it's there.

For 2,500 years, people have been writing odes. Why? I think that there's something innately human in wanting to praise the world even though it's disappointing in so many ways. There's always that tension.

If someone didn't believe in me that would kind of be a compliment in a way.

I was raised in a strict fundamentalist household, and I always say that gives you a muscle of belief. I want to believe in something, but I don't believe in what my parents believed in. Poetry has taken the place, or I think the arts have taken the place, of religion in my life. I wanted to see how that was working out through the poems.

I guess it was easier for me to find my voice in poetry than it was in fiction. I'm working on fiction again, and I find it a lot more difficult. It's a struggle. At a certain point, you have your voice and you go to it every time, so it's not like reinventing the wheel. That's the way I see it at least.

When I was a young woman, I had this friend who was really beautiful, and she would talk about how she was losing her looks, that she wasn't as pretty as she once was. She was gorgeous, and I thought, I'm going to stop this bad habit of self-criticism that I think a lot of women get into. You make a choice to be different.