I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don’t separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?

Not seeing rivers is also another way of dying.

The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.

There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies.

if you aren't here your heart won't break in the same way.

I always had a few people who liked what I did, and that was enough.

There is in Ammiel Alcalay’s work an unabashed tenderness for the world as it is, and that makes him courageous, different.