5 Quotes by Nikky Finney

My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away.

I remember saying to myself, those things are very, very important to hear, but there must be another way to say them so that they will truly be heard. I mean, that’s what art is. Art is about being provocative; art is also about beauty and if you leave the latter out, the former doesn’t matter.

Watch your life as if it were a film. Absorb everything. What you see, hear, and feel will stamp every alphabet of your work.

In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading Render how deeply I was handing everything over.

The library, to me, is the second most sacred physical space on the planet.