If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

I love what's left after love has been tested.