“I do feel (and this helped me persevere, in completing the collection) that stories of trauma endured and resisted by people of color, particularly women of color, have been silenced so many times that there is value in telling these stories, however imperfectly.”
“With small presses, I definitely feel like we’re all in this together and my experience has been that we are a community rather than a group of competitors.”
“The main thing that’s changed over the period of time in which these poems were written is that I care a lot less about being capital-P Poetic than I used to. This is most likely due to a combination of leaving an academic environment and discovering a whole wealth of lesser-known indie poets (and prose writers too) online whose work absolutely punched my gut and yet seemed totally unconcerned with whether or not it was ‘doing enough’ in terms of craft.”
“Poems are personal devotional devices. They’re little shrines—places you touch again and again, in editing, arranging and rearranging the contents until you have them just right, just so beautiful or compelling that god / God can’t ignore them.”
“Half the stories are about people in cities or in urban centers of the West who are only kind of glancingly aware of the anger and the occupation that’s going on around them.”