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

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.