The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandf….

There are definitely connections between poems, but I wanted each to stand on its own. I guess it goes back to the idea of trying to zoom in and out,….

One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path..

I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature ….

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable..

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on..

You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impo….

But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed..

It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the wa….

Michael Koryta's THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is an absolutely thrilling read. I read most of it with my breath held, occasionally exhaling to ask myself, ….

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with ….

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access a….

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mi….

I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a pa….

I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand..

All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men….

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision..