I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I'd missed your giving up.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

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.

All pain is the same. Only the details are different.

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.