The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it’s fallen in love with the floor.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

I've just always loved animals. So I've often thought that if I weren't a writer I'd work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals.

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

Prayer is a royal power.

Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.

You think this is a walk in the park, that it’s all beauty pageants and tea parties? Come on girl, wake up! This is survival at its most intense.

A life of nothing's nothing worth From that first nothing ere his birth To that last nothing under earth.

In war, the chief incalculable is the human will.

The English language is nobody's special property.

Real elation is when you feel you could touch a star without standing on tiptoe.

Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?

I want to lead an important life. I want to do it because I was born a human being.

I think everybody's book is about somebody's daughter, in a lot of ways. I dig that.