Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.

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

The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

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

I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.

If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.