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“One cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page without feeling more alive. If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?”

— May Sarton, talking about Virginia Woolf in  Journal of a Solitude: The Journals of May Sarton

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“I rather like to be slugged, to walk away from the poem with old wounds reopened…let the poem bruise me.”

— Anne Sexton, from a letter to Carolyn Kizer, featured in A Self-Portrait in Letters

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“I’m staring hard around me past the pinks the poppies and the precipice that let me see the wide Pacific unsuspecting even trivial by virtue of its vast surrender. I am a woman searching for her savagery even if it’s doomed.”

— June Jordan, from ‘Poem for Nana’ featured in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan

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“Minute by minute, I do not get up and just go to him – by day, twenty blocks away; by night, due across the city’s woods, where night-crowned heron sleep. It is what I do now: not go, not see or touch. And after eleven million six hundred sixty-four thousand minutes of not, I am a stunned knower of not. Then I let myself picture him a moment: the bone that seemed to surface in his wrist after I had held my father’s hand in coma; then up, over his arm, with its fold, from which for a friend he gave his blood. Then a sense of his presence returns, his flesh which seemed, to me, made as if before the Christian God existed, a north-island baby’s body become a man’s, with that pent spirit, its heels dug in, those time-worn heels, those elegant flat feet; and then, in a sweep, calf shin knee thigh pelvis waist, and I run my irises over his feathered chest, and on his neck, the scar, dollhouse saucer of tarnish set in time’s throat, and up to the nape and then dive again, as the swallows fly at speed – cliff and barn and bank and tree – at twilight, just over the surface of a sloping terrain. He is alive, he breathes and moves! My body may never learn not to yearn for that one, or this could be a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.”

— Sharon Olds, “Not Going to Him” from Stag’s Leap

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Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin 

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“My little brother has a whole lot of mouth. The boy won’t stop talking, squawking as if he just hatched from an egg and is hungry to bite off more than he can chew. My mother calls him a baby bird hanging in a murder of crows. She’s saying he flocks to the wrong crowd of black birds but in certain areas our lives may be dangling from trees quite literally anyway. My mother hates when I travel. She wants to keep me at home, to keep the both of us safe. She knows when I’m away I walk around the ghetto, take the bus, ride the train. Show me the hood and I will show you a nest.”

— Deonte Osayande, “Raven,” published in Indiana Voice Journal

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“i looked at you for the very first time, before you’d ever seen my face and then you turned, and i saw the whole room open into a field of color”

— Noor Ibn Najam, “Lesson,” from Praise to Lesser Gods of Love

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“An old carpenter builds a chair, the sight of which makes him weep. Does everything we build commence spillage? Commune with memory?”

— Phillip B. Williams, “Bend as Would a God,” published in Blackbird

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Nicole Sealey, from Ordinary Beast

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“home is wherever the grief washes off your hands with the most ease.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, “While Watching the Music Video for ‘Only One’ at Midnight, Kanye West Walks Into the Fog Holding His Daughter in His Arms & I Can See the Clouds Outside of My Window Parting Into Two Wings,” from Vintage Sadness

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“Time done the other way is still time. Your mother pressing her palm to the bluegrass to the eyebright and arrowheads. We walked to the property line and marked with speaking everywhere that history touched us.”

— Bradley Trumpfheller, from Reconstructions

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“As a child, I stapled my fingers together Sometimes you are born without wanting to sign for peace”

— Meghan Privitello, “ENEMIES, LOVE YOUR,” published in the Kenyon Review

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“In my dream, I built a funeral pyre. For myself, you understand. I thought I had suffered enough. I thought this was the end of my body: fire seemed the right end for hunger; they were the same thing. And yet you didn’t die? It was a dream; I thought I was going home.”

— Louise Glück, “Inferno,” from Vita Nova

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“I like to write poems…but I don’t like to see through a tiny telescope all the way to hell…”

— Chelsey Minnis, “Preface 27,” from Bad Bad

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“Just as some cultures have a hundred words for ‘snow,’ there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.”

— Saeed Jones, from How We Fight for Our Lives

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“Mine is a faithful love: all anchor & no white flag. See how I have arrived here in this yard that is not mine, but was & still is most fertile in the shallow graves made by my being always already on my knees? Habit makes my fingers take up the plow in the bed I built even when another body does not drag me from it. Might I have been a bridge that bends—or a dog that sways but stays—with every blow instead.”

— Meg Day, “Trespassing at Noontide,” published in Poetry International

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“I want to be able to put a poem I’ve written on a table and have someone pick it up and say ‘Patricia, you must have dropped this poem’ and my name’s not on it … We should all be in pursuit of signature.”

— Patricia Smith, interviewed by Melissa Studdard for VIDA Voices & Views