Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself.

I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.

The world makes liars of us all.

The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I've talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about. I think vets on the whole want the same things that everybody else does.