My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, 'Give and Take,' was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.

If a person gives nothing of what he has, either take nothing or take everything. If a person serves everything, take one. If a person gives one, either take it or leave it, depending on your feelings and his motives.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.