When food devolves to nutrients, we need experts to tell us how to eat. Poetry is at the mercy of such forces. But “you do not need to fathom a carrot’s complexity in order to reap its benefits,” concludes Pollan. So eat the carrot. Write the poem. Eat the poem, says the carrot—

Thick hardcover bindings in forest green, red, or blue, held issues dated decades ago. Recent issues sat on metal shelves facing the opening. Every page harboured a different story, a different promise. It was within this space that I felt the most homely.

I’m interested in the immediacy of poems, something approaching improvisation, and yet shaped. I’m interested in the sound of poems, the interplay of words and voice. Giving the poem its due as a way to connect.

As a poet, scholar, and fiction writer, I write most often about hauntings— by this I mean the imprint that is left behind by an experience, a person, or a place. I am constantly excited by moments when genres intersect or cross over to create something new.

Jenny Odell calls artworks “training apparatuses for attention”; “if what we see forms the basis of how we act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear”[...] This is what my poetry is for: to widen the cracks in myself and peek through, to look past myself at the world.

Hologrammatic, poems are sourced in memory, speech, and books. They draw upon language held in commons and attend to folk and pop culture. Poems elaborate, borrow, and recycle.

but for me in writing the mysteries of my inner world are illuminated much like the mechanics of dreaming. I strive to balance the many conflicting elements of a poem and what I think to be true. My poetic both implores and declares: Let us understand

I wanted to capture some of the complexities and frustrations involved in this process: the obsessive and depressive nature of the illnesses; the unpredictability of the medications; […] the darkly comic nature of mental illness in general; the hunger for stability of some kind. I was trying to say: I’ve been through this, and it’s messy as hell, and I want you to know what it’s like.

The thing is, those two tracks—the one the ephemeral swinging open of the occasionally encountered door to an elsewhere I call poetry, the other the long slow “project”—so often converge.

Against extractive conceit—in poetry, I hone my refusal of apathy, provincialism, inferiority, and fragility. May I always tow lines attuned to old and new music.

so I sometimes think the poem is an animal showing proper simple complicated being and imagine if you could help it begin to come-to-be then that’d be astounding but mostly over here in this place I just fail at such stewardship

My poetics is very centered in the body and the various ways our experience runs through it. I consider grief, specifically the death of my mother, quite often in my work. Her loss is a thread that runs through all of my chapbooks, my album, and both of my books.

Now I apply myself to the task of a borrowed language, becoming mine, yet never mine. For whom is English an exclusive right, birthright, language entrenching a colony of values? To write, to make room with words, is to de-colonize, to lead the woman-child out of the labyrinth where she had been lost for lack of tongues.

Poems help me to distill, clarify and find meaning in life, both as a reader and as a writer. I write on themes of loss, trauma, oppression, healing, sex, love and the strangeness of existence. I love how an ugly first draft will shape shift, showing me what it wants and needs to be.

I'm an exophonic author writing poetry in two languages: one that I was born into, and the other that I migrated into. My work is a display of two languages, English and Persian, that are not semantically in conversation with each other.

I imagine my poetics is a box of curiosities: an unusual rock, a railway spike, a cat’s eye given by an older sibling, some old coins, one stamped with my birthyear. Objects I dig out every now and then, reorder, shuffle around. Here’s a few items currently in the mix. Attentiveness.

But if I tried to read poems at breakfast, I would probably become the egg. The lake would stand up and chase me down the street. I can barely stand music while reading poetry too because poetry is not still but very quiet. A room rearranging itself with every step you take. Stanza, door, sinking floors? No

Poetry is where my heart goes to live; to mediate on its joys, and sorrow, to wallow in the emotion of the moment and stretch it out in long delicious sentiments to fill me, and hopefully others up.

I delve into mythology, historical texts and images to search out the thing, the predicament or worry or little obsession on which to write and often find more than I can keep up with. I hope my poems are welcoming…

The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.