Nonfiction
The first time a poem really enraptured me, I was twelve. In a thin, gray-paper anthology of poetry, I read Sylvia Plath’s poem, The Night Dances. It made me riotous and cosmically dizzy. I felt the warmth coming off me like Plath’s comets, bleeding and peeling all over the place. When you’re twelve, it’s hard to understand that other people feel things as strongly as you do. You think you have some sort of special claim on emotions. But Plath was my way into someone else, an admission that there were other people who felt like they were always coming apart and spiraling into “the black amnesias of heaven.” It was the first poem I memorized.