La poésie ne se fait pas à côté de la vie, elle en fait partie, et comme la vie, je la sais sujette aux politisations, traversée par les violences. Inquiète et tapageuse.

The moment is a fish and the poet a hook. Like the time I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth and my daughter was in the bathtub washing her hair.

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.”