Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

It's very hard to look in a mirror and see anything which resembles what one feels one's self to be. I think that discomfort, that dislocation, disintegration - that raw lack of feeling whole - that dysmorphia - is a very good place, in this moment, to hunt for the kind of experience which really requires the means of poetry to be grasped or felt.

I wanted to pack a lot into the lyric, but not go beyond its bounds. Some have written that I wanted to expand what the lyric could do. I just want the hugeness of experience-which includes philosophical discursiveness-to move at a rate of speed that kept it (because all within one unity of experience) emotional. Also, often, questions became the way the poems propelled themselves forward It brings the reader in as a listener to a confession[.] A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.