The most notable fact our culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits.

When a woman tells the truth, she creates the possibility for more truth around her.

I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?

'Storm Warnings' is a poem about powerlessness - about a force so much greater than our human powers that while it can be measured and even predicted, it is beyond human control. All 'we' can do is create an interior space against the storm, an enclave of self-protection, though the winds of change till penetrate keyholes and 'unsealed apertures.'

The retreat into sameness – assimilation for those who can manage it – is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression, economic insecurity, and a renewed open season on difference.

We write from the marrow of our bones.

There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.