You can start looking for things that aren’t there. If a poem elicits an emotional response, you don’t need to pull it apart to figure out why.
“I don’t know if my longing to incorporate all of the voices I’ve heard and still seek out wouldn’t be as present as it is if I didn’t come up in a place where there were so many singing, harmonizing with the city.”
“I believe that part of the task of translation is to help us explore that complexity rather than looking away, and to understand difference instead of erasing it.”
On some level, Vermont remains the arugula-chomping hippie at the farmers’ market, while New Hampshire is still a guy asserting his right to mow the lawn while naked.
“And here’s the thing: even if folks are from the ghetto or the reservation, their lives do not fit into these predetermined binaries.”
You can disappear in a variety of ways – you can just not be spoken about, you can not be seen, the media disappears people all the time.
Sometimes the work of a given story is to trace the contours of a question or a problem, and the story ends the moment the question snaps into focus or the problem reveals itself. That’s very different from trying to answer the question or solve the problem.
“Even more than I ever wanted to write a book, I wanted to have health insurance.”
But we are hopefully past the stage where the Anglophone world is only willing to provide space for three, four “big” writers per country/language at a time.
I sought out ways to capture the feeling of euphoria surrounded by pain; how memories worm themselves into everything.