...you shouldn’t reason the same way in emergencies as you do when things are normal.

The tropes are in charge, far more than actual people.

Kay Ryan's "Shoot the Moon" is a tough poem.

"Poetry is a kind of money." I can't imagine writing that and not saying to yourself man I wish.

I don't want to admit I'm being squeezed. I don't want to admit I lack room. I want to pretend like everything's normal.

"All you did," says Kay Ryan, "was / walk into a room." Just from that, you unknowingly scaled a sheer vertical face.

...I can't help but feel the pull of the words "Bait Goat."

I am not in the mood for Kay Ryan's "Salvage."

The sacred as untouchable, inviolable, inaccessible makes sense to me.

I confess confusion regarding the word "nihilism."

Really good art makes you really mad.

Kay Ryan does not bring us to the landscape, but the land itself.

"Hope is a discipline," Mariame Kaba says.

I've watched too many videos from those who follow waddling ducks.

Should a writer be toxic? Raising the stakes, erasing the past, undoing social bonds?

I’m still not entirely comfortable with calling answered prayers for parking spaces or relief of everyday anxieties “miraculous.”

Ryan, like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, is also a poet of “existential horror.” She extends hope, but her lyrics terrify if attended properly.

I know people who must keep the television and radio on. Who must always be on the phone. Noise and noisiness, a way of life.

...I’ve been to the Grand Canyon. What took me aback was how colorful it was. As if it were a source of rainbows within the Earth itself.

We believe in the behavior which looks positive. We believe so much that we find signs. Signs of something we wish was real.