"I guess I like poems that seem to speak to/with someone, to be in a dialogue of sorts, even if we only see one side of that conversation physically drawn out on the page."
"Perhaps the call to action, as you say, to myself and readers of the poem, is to risk having connections, investments, and loves big enough to wreck you."
"So, once I saw how those writers conceptualized their own worlds, I wanted to emulate that perspective. I wanted my pieces to end with someone kicking the door open, or picking the mic up for once."
"I used to encourage my students to use the literature we read as a way in to more personal essay writing, and so bringing the novel to my own experience felt like what I, as a teacher, would have told myself to do."
"Editing has helped my writing because reading poems only makes me want to read more poems and write more poems and see, hear, and taste more poems—and learn more about what makes poetry poetry."
"Artists embrace the challenge of making the familiar new again by uncovering what is unique in their experience and resisting the constant temptation to succumb to cliché."
"But form is best for me when it’s the most invisible, and the single-stanza whoosh is somehow both almost-invisible in its proximity to prose as well as it is hyper-visible in its looking like a brick wall."
