“Yes, silence does follow the colon at the end of the poem, yet it could also imply possibility or the hope of possibility or it could imply more of the same.”
“Repetition also helped me depict the claustrophobia and exasperation of caring for an infant, especially when your body doesn’t do the work it is expected to.”
“I often write in the third person, using my first name Margaret. I suppose it is a way of trying to render how we can feel so separate from ourselves, always observing.”
“His arrival in Australia is a pivotal moment: The lack of documentation, losing the written Chinese version of his name, this is where it all starts, with this seemingly simple process of entering the country and declaring himself. Everything goes awry from here.”
“I don’t know if I know yet where this poem lives, though it lives somewhere close to me. So the title as an address is a reaching, or a call to which maybe, hopefully, there will sound a response.”
“It’s meant to be something of a self-indictment. This moment is peaceful, yes, but in part because of what the speaker is choosing to exclude. The privacy provided by the trees protects the speaker and also discourages her from considering the world beyond her own comfort.”
“We hauled furniture and filled our mouths with chewing tobacco. We spent holidays together in a halfway house. Ryan was human – wonderful, kind, compassionate, creative, but also deeply, fundamentally, afraid and mean and sick. He died. I didn’t.”
“I think of poems as a sort of dance between tension and resolution, where some images or ideas seem to raise the stakes while others provide a release or otherwise alter whatever dynamic is at play.”
“Within the context of how I grew up, I’ve often had to revisit and ask the question: If I were a parent trying to raise a child in a certain environment, how would I want to control the ways that their body is seen and being seen?”
“There is something magical about airports, train stations, bus stops, etc. … They make us think honestly about our between-ness and our aloneness and our inescapable connectedness.”
“I have been out for six Pride seasons now, and through each one that passes, I become a better human and writer, aided in large part by others from my community.”
“My very proper Southern grandmother would definitely frown on the personal essay and the memoir because it divulges too much, and privacy and keeping your business to yourself—especially your mess—are both hallmarks of being a lady.”
