Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.

Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.

"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.