I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.

I think words are the thing that either triumphs for you, in your desire to communicate something, or fails. I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.

I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.