For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense.

I know my curiosity as a writer and as a person makes me really interested in moving to parts of the country that I haven't explored through writers' festivals or through the kind of campus visits that I do on a regular basis and engaging with people who may be readers of poetry and may not.

I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?'

When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents.

The Royal Family doesn't go out shopping for their uniforms: they've got some guy sewing on all the ornaments in-house. You could say I've got my own in-house team as well.

In Mexico you have death very close. That's true for all human beings because it's a part of life, but in Mexico, death can be found in many things.

I'm at a stage in my life when I want a wife and a family.

When I was younger, most people thought my lips looked like Tweety Bird's - there were always comments like that from family and neighbors.