Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.

People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

But here I hold your dream in my poem.