I loved poetry before I knew anything about writing. In one of my earliest school memories, I recall being delighted by (and slightly obsessed with) the sounds in David McCord’s “Pickety Fence.” By the time I was ten years old, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I devoured poems by Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, C.D. Wright, and so many others. Getting an MFA in poetry was the culmination of a dream. Turns out, poetry isn’t my main focus now, but I’ve kept a few of my older poems here.