Poetry is both abstract crime and crime,

Better than love and worse, a waste of time

—Daniel Poppick, “November”

How sad, that first time, to use the past tense / when speaking of someone. / The living, solid verb gives way in the end

—Enrique Servín Herrera, trans. by Robin Myers and Katherine Silver

I tend to think about translation in terms of singing or dancing, so that your whole body is involved in the process.

—Christina MacSweeney, interviewed by Gabriella Martin

John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, George Kennan, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir, Baldwin, Sontag, it turns out they’re all part of more or less the same world. I’ve often wondered about that: in any particular cultural moment, how many key actors form the glue?

— Louis Menand, interviewed by Christian Schlegel

The plants sort of trickled in; it wasn’t like I went to a nursery and brought home a miniature jungle. They arrived one at a time, like guests at a dinner who all had some secret about one another.

— Matthew Dickman, “Plants”

For me it has been both the most public and private of years. A year in which I have turned to nature as never before, but with the shrill soundtrack of the TV news never far off.

— David Gessner, “The News”