I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect was on the outside of understanding that. I think that's what's so destructive.

I actually don't think of whiteness and heterosexuality as 'the norm'. Maybe there are people who still do but none of them are close friends of mine.

I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites, a lot of time spent with my stories.

When you think of how a child experiences a series of events, it feels, for so long, like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.

As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.

I don't know how women stop being friends with other women.

Don't trust women, my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours.