He started as a single Clay Aiken, the one we all knew with the smiling face and aw-shucks demeanor

Her first reaction was to laugh: "That's so like you, Camilla, to lose an entire car." 

It’s clear that most of these students hate Sal, Dean, and Kerouac.

believing in nothing
listening to jazz
cooking purple sprouting
rituals evoking
somelike
the aspirations
of the expectations
of a certain

the drugs didn’t wear off,
the guy she wants to get in bed
                                doesn’t really care.

when she was 6 she’d never touch cigarettes,
                                but drugs made her slip

washing the wound
in beer and poetry

Look, you smile too much or too little, both at the wrong times, and people don’t like you.  

Yellow 1 & 2

I will no longer keep you; I will remember you yellow

you have a beautiful yellow
ache, a scarf made of heavy eyelashes.
I keep you tucked in my backpack among
other

We turned off the game and drove to the mountains, a dead dog in the backseat

And she doesn’t know a word of German, except “bier.”

One day I came across an inverted map of the Western Hemisphere. Cape Horn was in Alaska's usual position. I felt very disturbed, like air was flooding into the space above North America and

love becoming, like an apple,
this requires time, starred
blossom, then summer, the attention
of bees, grown men
bow their heads, concentrating
on the national anthem
in stadiums

After watching the TEDx Talk, I initially thought, “I wonder if everyone who watches that video will try to write a memoir.”

You write a book with three parts. Sure, a few critics come down hard, but mostly the book is appreciated.

[practice breathing, talk to snakes, how to suck venom from a wound]

     -february 3, 2012: “I’m getting better at branching out”

I want as a reader to be transformed and thrown off balance by what I read, and I try to do that for my reader as well.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

The rock is slow to change. The wave can be exploded by a breeze.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that.