I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.

Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.

The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.