“Writing is magic. I have no idea how I go about it, or why it sometimes flows and other times doesn’t. But I do know I was given a lot of gifts, including…

“Stuck? Here is a little apartment where the coffee got cold/and the woman of his dreams sits up in bed/eating hangover ravioli while this man rewrites instructions/on how to load a website full…

“For this group of poems, I adopted the prose form to invoke the voice of an anonymous speaker, perhaps snatching truth and wisdom from the four corners of creation, independent of time and…

“Before a bulldozer came to flatten/the house, neighbors knew it would happen, looked/out from their late poker games and pool cues,/lifted bottles to the past, when we were/still alive, not quite in our…

“When I began writing poems about my parents’ deaths, which happened three months apart, it was difficult to write anything. It was especially difficult to write grief poems and want them to be…

“The me that is me eats cheese and wishes there were more chocolate in the gorp. The you that is you fixes on the only point you cannot reach, a messy hike over…

“In the dispiriting wake of a dispiriting election season, I felt the only sustainable way forward would be to choose kindness and love—the soft power of water—not the obdurate hardness of anger and…

“My brother bought/ a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid./ My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove/ a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology./ I smoked my…

“He went to the kitchen for water, for air, for the screws that tightened in his chest, & when he returned it was if she had diminished to a viceroy of herself, nothing…

“Bessie’s gone under the water,/baby held high in the air/hoping that someone will grab her./Safety was only a few streets away/when the boat capsized/into the flooded street./Men in the nearby john boats/quickly plucked…