I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.

I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.