I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems.

For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.

Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.

I'm always somehow drawn to that sense of how fragile things are and how a garden means so differently depending upon whose language you happen to be in or whose century you happen to be in.

I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of reading.

I want literature to open all the doors that I can't open by myself, and to allow me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise see.

I think about the kinds of gardens that Queen Elizabeth put up. She made gardens in the shape of an "E," for Elizabeth, just one more way in which she used symbolism to solidify her reign: appearing as the Virgin Queen, for example, or wearing a dress embroidered with eyes and ears to indicate that she knew all that was going on in her castle; she had spies.