Through writing, I hope to always have a path back to a home that I can no longer physically return to. Through poetry, I hope to make a home in a different shape, in another form.

The poetry I love best has no illusions about its limits, brings us to the furthest threshold of what’s possible in language, then lets us go. This kind of poetry is maybe not exactly expressing the inexpressible, but it does bring us to awareness of the inexpressible.

I stumbled into poetry entirely by accident. I noticed that the notes I took nightly about what had happened that day on the job, just to help me understand the strange male construction culture I’d fallen into, were getting shorter and shorter. They looked almost like – could it be – poetry?

In my poetrying practice, I never care about the reader’s response. Like Li Shangyin’s spring silk worm, my sole concern is to turn out what is best inside of me; if people do not care about my contribution to the world, why should I?

There is the technical aspect, of course, having fun with words and seeing how ingenious you can be with a line break or a metaphor. And then there's the moment when you realize what the poem does, what histories and knowledge it shares, and what futures it imagines.

A child waving at strangers from a car window, the thrillful bliss of someone waving back, that’s all I want for my poems.

I think poets breathe the air of the poets alive around them as well as those that have come before. It’s inevitable that a poet’s pieces are filled with echoes of other poets, obvious or subtle.

A poem is a capsule—simultaneously a record of a moment and a gesture to forever. A poem is a way to work through, or toward, something.

Etel Adnan says, “Writing forces one to go the bitter end of what thinks.*” Her statement strikes a chord with me—the demanding mental and emotional striving towards a meaningful and artistic poem, finding its core and form in a morass of cloudy ideas and feelings.

For me, poetry is an opportunity to fully engage with a singular aspect of writing in a way that isn’t possible with other genres.

Humour is real. Even in darkness. A friend used to say, “Your poems show us what insides look like.”

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.