I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

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

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

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

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