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

But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.

There are definitely connections between poems, but I wanted each to stand on its own. I guess it goes back to the idea of trying to zoom in and out, and to modulate, so there are different ways of looking at any experience for the reader. Even having short poems and long poems - there has to be some kind of variation in the experience of reading as a whole.

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.

I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

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