Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

After love a formal feeling comes.

Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the pressure of her extreme weariness ... one day in January she drew a razor blade lightly across the inside of her arm, near the elbow, to see what would happen.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.