“Poems have always been a place for questions for me. Not answers. And I have a lot of questions these days.”

It’s not that I want to be, but it’s a fascination of the mind and it plays a role in why I want to live my life a certain way.

One of the reasons I’ve felt so connected to poetry throughout the years is because it’s the only art form that has breath built into it. And I need that breath now. I need that breath so much. So, yes, it is a refuge for me. Absolutely.

I’m always telling my students that the weirdest thing is the truth. I mean, the fact that we get up in the morning and put on clothes is weird.

I have been writing. Even when I intend not to write, I find myself writing. I’m currently in a place where I should be putting together the fifth book, but then more poems are coming. It’s exciting and somewhat daunting.

All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame. I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,

Moving away from “useful” doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health.

The more I am aware of my mortality the better person I am and the better I am at choosing a life that is aware of its beauty.

I kind of hate it.” Or, “Oh you wait tables? I didn’t know that was something people did.” I say it can be invigorating because, on some level, we have to evaluate what we do and why we do it almost daily.

You know how we are when a new book of poems is at last coming together – all frenzy, distraction, and bounty? It’s as if I’ve turned into summer itself.

Precise, graceful, and generous, the poems in SuperLoop, seem to be born out of a deep, careful attention and a profound compassion.

The longed-for return of the bees. Unaffected and inherently hopeful, Callihan’s work is as merciful as it is moving.

Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional.

We have to explain ourselves to people all the time. We have to say, “Yes, I am a unicorn, believe in me.”

There’s so much rage in the world now and I’m finding poems to be the place where I want to stay. I rage and rage and then write a poem and return to breathing.

I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

Sometimes the quiet observer, sometimes the kid in the center of the messed-up carnival, these poems are the fireflies you’ve missed all winter

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

Whatever has you afraid, angry, intimidated or frustrated tonight – take it to our all-powerful and all-capable God. He has the answer.

There’s an answer, if you reach into your soul, and the sorrow that you know will melt away.

When people say, ‘She’s got everything’, I’ve got one answer – I haven’t had tomorrow.

Won’t someone please answer my prayers before I’m old and gray. I’ve been lonely too long and all my family thinks I’m gay.

When you finally accept that it’s OK not to have answers and it’s OK not to be perfect, you realize that feeling confused is a normal part of what it is to be a human being.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.