The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.

Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.

I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.

I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.