“I was introduced to the flash form on Fictionaut, a website for authors to post and discuss their work. I found it nourishing and magical, like a miniature painting, every color highlighting a detail, shaping a world.”

“I use the personal and attach it to the general. By showing the reader things we all have in common (parts of the body) we are able to give our personal experiences more relatability.”

“I do want to say as much as I can in a few words, and many of these very short poems tend to find their way to me pretty much whole. Like a fruit falling from a branch. Though like a fruit that gets some leaves clipped, or gets polished. “

“We've been trained to identify style from various cookbooks: the jargon of psychology, for instance, might posit the manic vs. the depressive (in search of trauma) in a modernity enamored with itself; there's also the jargon of power relations, or the misnomer of the political, that pours into national, ethnic, and racial modes to legitimize or disenfranchise the poem in the name of a liberal, democratic act that affirms the hegemonic, which it claims to resist…”

“Literary translation is a creative act, so it’s impossible to completely remove the translator’s voice and style from the equation, and unfair to expect it, but at the same time, I believe the translator should make every effort not to ‘brand’ the text with her signature touch. In other words, my voice shouldn’t be readily recognizable…”

“‘Teacher’ grew out of an airport car service driver telling me about a freeway rock-throwing incident off I-80 in Pennsylvania. The driver’s wife had worked in a school one of the rock-throwers attended, which he mentioned only in passing, but it stuck fast in my mind. What if a person worried or suspected she knew exactly how a kid would turn out, and it was not good? What would she do then, or wish she’d done later?”

“Many of the poems in Tséyi’ call upon memory to recreate those experiences and emotions. ‘Sunbeam is the poem where the voice is a child recalling that horrifically sad day, and so it was essential that the language, metaphor, and narrative be simple and disjunctive— just like a child would retell something they saw or experienced. In poems such ‘Rising Song, Elegy,’ the speaker is much older looking back on the experience, trying to recall what it was like.”