Articles

I think most of my work is inspired by random threads of words that I hear and images that stick in my mind and won’t let go, and I follow those threads to find out why they’ve stuck.

Spending so much time immersed in the push and pull of the ocean currents and tides has made its mark on my inner rhythms and outward perspective.

As a stay-at-home mother of three boys, poetry became for me a way to carve out a “room of my own” to record and bear witness to life—past, present, and imagined.

I wanted to see if it was even possible to write a story in my second language. I thought that would be the most challenging thing in my life so I wanted to try!

If I had to choose one word to capture a recurring obsession, it would be lucidity. I think that if my writings are to have any relevance, they would be because they resulted from seeing as clearly as I could…

I found this rehab notebook from 2006 buried in a box, skimmed through it, and found a dozen questions, some of which turned into poems, but all of which left me thinking about my life in ways they didn’t at the time (for obvious reasons).

We follow the girl through escaping a Bosch painting, walking into Lake Michigan, and going to hell in an overnight bag among other dystopian futures that each seem incongruent with one another. But linking all of these potentials together is the yearning to be loved that the girl expresses within each image, line, and phrase of the book…

I love it that the rasp takes on its own identity and exhibits all the loss of desire that comes with the aging process, like a stiff mink with its teeth frozen open.

The best way to write is to write. So better don’t talk about it. Finish something you started because that is always a first draft.

Breathing tightly, encased in slippery yet familiar bark, this poetry collection evokes reflection on the legacy of geo-political turmoil of the Kurdish people without delineating an intellectually overwhelming timeline chock-full of statistics.