“Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

“part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you”

“I offer you what I have myPoverty”

“from what we cannot hold the stars are made”

“Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.”

“So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words”

“Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.”

“Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to ...”

“They say that it is always poets that die in wars, and I never got over a sense of being in the trenches.”