Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

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

I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.