The most dangerous thing I've ever encountered was a run-in with Boko Haram around 2007 in a small town in Nigeria. I got caught along with the photographer I was working with, the same one I worked with on the Afghanistan book, Seamus Murphy. We were caught in an attack by a mob after Friday prayers. And the level of violence was so extreme. It was more violent than any other mob violence I have ever seen.

The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice.

Poetry allows me to write about what I don't know, whereas journalism demands a higher level of certainty to be worthy of being written.

The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice. Landays, they're about love and pleasure and oppression and levels of oppression within a family. And because of that, I think rap music is probably closely related.

One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such." And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them."

I think most good poetry is about suffering; I think that's what underlies the love in these landays pieces - suffering and longing.

News isn't designed to talk about daily life in its nuances, but poetry is.