I believe in striving to show how we are closer to each other than the powers that try to divide us.

So poetry can be a mirror, a window, a door—
a microscope, a telescope, a kaleidoscope!

I navigate the delicate balance between fragility and resilience, capturing the struggle to define oneself in the face of trauma and societal expectation.

Winter is the cruelest season

for insomniacs

And so, where do the seeds or beginnings of my poems come from? Nine times out of ten, it’s visual—I see the moment, the scene, and then build around it but always from the heart.

I’ve given up the fantasy of reconstructing a formally perfect 17th century Kashmiri Persianate world in my head by now. My effort to hold onto multiple languages will likely remain as imperfect and unfinished as it is rewarding, lively, and frequently hilarious; what matters most is persistence.

It validates either that you are not alone in how you have experienced or understand the universe, in all its beauty and horror; or that others are out here searching, too

By using creative expression as a form of research, I challenge conventional scholarly boundaries, embracing the subjective, emotional, and personal.

Once a poem is published, I’m curious to explore its second life, its border-blur with other people and media. 

Poetry is a witness statement of my life—memories, longing, grief, fear.

We need to have practical ways of managing wildfires, but it’s also important to express how it feels when the air is suddenly unbreathable, or when the sky is yellow for days on end.

I used to be moved by work that was strange and avant garde (if that word means anything anymore), but the older I get I also want poetry to make me feel something

So much of poetry is connected to community. We do the writing alone, but we’re always working within a larger circle, speaking to the poets whose collections we love, whose writing lives in us as surely as our own words do.

Through poetry, I believe I can use pain and anger as productive, redemptive forces. I can write critically from a place of love, soften into tough but necessary conversations, and I can work to create an aura of inclusivity, granting space, as the universe does, to migraines and orgasms alike, to contradictory truths and multiple versions of the same story.

Poetry allows us to inhabit the experience and thoughts of another human being, to find some small part of ourselves reflected.

My mother hunted moose

as a child my grandfather taught her

how to field dress a bull:

make an incision from the throat

to the pelvis

Poetry is not a genre so much as a methodology for my interaction with the world. I am not a “solo” writer:

Reading one 16-line fragment is very different from reading 256 of them. Something very interesting happens when all those words pile up on each other over a few hours.

Poems connect us. They are intermediaries when grief blinds us, when joy takes our breath away, when memories visit in the night and don’t leave a trace.

To fully experience a poem is to eclipse our perceived selves and enter into something more heeding and resolute than the frangible cage of flesh, bone and breath that we exist in.