Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.

I want him everywhere. I burn for him in places he hasn't even touched.

You will never get to your destination on time if choose to walk two paths through life.

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events not of words. Trust movement.

The fewer our wants the nearer we resemble the gods.

All addictions have one thing in common - they numb you out to what is happening in the moment.

Don't sacrifice your political convictions for the convenience of the hour.

I'm so bored. I went to the food locker yesterday to visit my meat.

But it is never over; nothing ends until we want it to. Look, in shattered midnights, On black ice under silver trees, We are still dancing, dancing.

Love can't mature in one room. It has to come out of the full sharing of everything: joys, aspirations, downfalls, all of it. That's the only real path to love.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe