EXCERPT FROM THE INTERVIEW

The American dream doesn’t always have soft, smooth edges; there’s room for the struggle in our stories about ourselves. There’s room for what’s difficult. Part of the challenge of poetry is to take just the movement and heat and motion, the essence, of those stories and put that down so anyone can get at it, like opening a box, a gift box with something wonderful inside. Poetry is huge stories contained in small spaces, and what I really want people to do is to go home and pick up a pen and say, I can do that, I can tell those stories, there are stories inside me.