“Like many other poets have said in the past, I love how much of life can be conveyed in so few words when you write poetry—how entire decades can be revealed in a few stanzas.”
“Often, the cost of American freedom is that we, as a society, don’t address problems prophylactically; we don’t provide a social network that would catch us in case of failure, disease, misfortune.”
“As both a writer and violinist, I’m constantly surrounded by discourse on the tangible power of art and literature in real life and have always believed in such power myself.”
“At first, I was unsure if this was the right starting place for the book. I feared that my obsession with yogurt making would not be interesting enough to a reader and they would put my book down.”
“I knew I wanted the poem’s brevity and straightforwardness to scrape up against the complexity of grief, so I kept it pretty short in every version I did.”
“Writing ‘Eighteen Takes on Being Jewish’ has made me a bit more comfortable with being the kind of Jewish person that I am—but I still struggle with the question of belonging to a Jewish institution such a synagogue.”
