There aren’t a lot of poems about some of these things I was experiencing-not even a lot of essays or memoirs either. I guess I could have chosen not to publish them, but it felt like once I had written them it would be wrong not to share them. Writing is how I make sense of the world, so it would be hard not to write the poems. I didn’t know how to really process what I was going through in my own personal life without just writing about it. I always want to make work that matters, even if it’s just to myself. You’ve always written about personal things in your work, but the poems in The Carrying feel even more intimate, particularly the poems about trying to conceive a child. And so this new book was just me trying to go a little further. I’m competing with my myself, right? I appreciate all the work I’ve written so far, but I’m always trying to push myself. And that’s not much different from how I usually feel. But other than that, I really just wanted to do good work. Mostly there was just the sense that I wanted to honor that connection with people who had been drawn to Bright Dead Things. Like, “Oh, people may read this.” There was that. Then after Bright Dead Things, there is a little bit of a pressure. Instead, I think about a reader, the person I am trying to communicate with, but I don’t have the idea that a lot of people are ever going to read anything. Did that create a certain amount of pressure going forward? Your last book, Bright Dead Things, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
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