When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

It is true that my characters have sex.

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

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of them, you know, every single one of us, that's what we all face. And so it's made me - that's the one change I've marked in myself - it's made me change in the way I relate to my students. I've become a different teacher in that way.

If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.