Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you're constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person. As another first person. There's a letting go that comes with it.

I asked a lot of friends and people I'd meet, "Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn't expect it to happen?" I wasn't interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary.

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.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

I was really interested in the fact that blacks have high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes at a higher percentage than the rest of the population. That didn't stay very aggressively in the book, but that's how it started. I began to document these moments as support for this other thing I was thinking about, and then the moments themselves began to take over.

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