Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.