I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there.
[T]here is a speaker who will simply persevere, who will, like “the heart trying to leave the chest,” keep going, and by keeping going, will tend always, though it’s sometimes hard, toward human connection. Toward love.
Though this account is full of wounds, losses, and hardships, the Sonia who emerges herein speaks of them with the kind of sinewy, bracing directness you would expect of a complete stranger sitting across from you at the bar.
I don’t believe we come to nor travel through poetry alone . . . Rather than “social” I would instead encourage the word “communal”; the former sounds a little more performative and exclusive to my ear than does the latter, which sounds more like an invitation.
Our lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important.
people do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.