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

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.

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