Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.

I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices.

There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I've found to be true: writing begets writing.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.

The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don't sink.