We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over itsunsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing, but the brack of wanting what’s physicalto help us forget we are physical.

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.

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.

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.

The light of God extinguishes the darkness.

The Mighty King is the God of all grace.

The most beautiful of human things are born in the shadows and thrive there and are endangered by light

I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being sometimes.

Call you up in the middle of the night. It's awful hard trying to make love long distance, but I really need stimulation.

Everybody knows that I'm shorter, but it doesn't bother me at all.

I think that any important educational goal can be realized via several routes.

Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.

The impossible exists only until we find a way to make it possible

The inconveniences we faced within this state are minor compared to... New Orleans.