In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.

I like to photograph miniature constructed scenes - I'll buy a very sad cake decoration like a plastic computer for a dreary office birthday party and construct a wildly colorful scene to put on its screen, or do a series of dollhouse chairs frozen in ice cubes.

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.

I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.

As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.

It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.

I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can't always tell they're failures until later... or I don't want to admit that they are.