Rae Armantrout quotes:

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs.

Like most of my poems, 'Lie' has several sources: I read a very troubling book called The Sixth Extinction. I took note of the way people, including me, enjoy talking knowledgeably about how the world will end. I drove to Tucson and saw the desert flowering on either side of the road. And I glanced at my spam to see what people wanted to sell me these days.

Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries."

This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

I know you by your willingness.

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.

A sense of mission lostin ink'sjagged outcrops.I was trying to tell myselfwhat I must have knownbeforein a formI wouldn't recognize at first.

SimpleComplex systems can arisefrom simple rules.It's notthat we want to survive,it's that we've been druggedand made to actas if we dowhile all the whilethe sea breaksand rolls, painlessly, under.If we're not copying it,we're lonely.Is this the knowledgethat demands to bepassed down?Time is made from swatchesof heaven and hell.If we're not killing it,we're hungry.

But here I hold your dream in my poem.

clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?

Curled up in bed,

Curled up in bed, I'm young in the old way.

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.

The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.

The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.