There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.

I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat; it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.