When You Do Try To Picture The

I'd Spent Way More Years Worrying About How To Look Like A Poet -- Buying Black Clothes, Smearing On Scarlet Lipstick, Languidly Draping Myself Over Thrift-store Furniture -- Than I Had Learning How To Assemble Words In Some Discernible Order.

The Failures Of Other Genres To Provide An Emotional Connection With Some Of Their Characters And Narratives Gives Memoir A Toehold.

In My Godless Household, Poems Were The Closest We Came To Sacred Speech -- The Only Prayers Said.

Ten Years, She's Dead, And I Still Find Myself Some Mornings Reaching For The Phone To Call Her. She Could No More Be Gone Than Gravity Or The Moon.

Childhood Was Terrifying For Me. A Kid Has No Control. You’re Three Feet Tall, Flat Broke, Unemployed, And Illiterate. Terror Snaps You Awake. You Pay Keen Attention. People Can Just Pick You Up And Move You And Put You Down.