“In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.”

“At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave A Message That's what my friend spokeinto his grim machine the winter he first went madas we both did in our thirties with stillno hope of revenue, gravely inkingour poems on pages held fast by gyres the color of lead. Godless, our minds did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swampuntil we sank. His eyes were burn holesin a swollen face. His breath was a venomhe drank deep of. He called his own tongue a scar, this poet who can crowbar openthe most sealed heart, make ash flower,and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelainand not a few locked doors) never touched my friend's throat. PraiseHim, whose earth is green. (for Franz Wright)”

“The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.”

“I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit.”

“I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.”

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.”

“Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.”