You know how sometimes you just have a memory of looking up and seeing a face looking over your crib and then remember nothing until tenth grade? - I have one of these early memories where I'm in the back of my parents' car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having to fight with venomous siblings over the only toy.

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.

...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.

Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.