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Most people come to Africa because they are drawn to its misery.

Ink to paper, she is inventory, has a price tag. A piece to catalog.

His shirt, he realized, was completely soaked, and he could actually see his heart rippling beneath the cotton.

through the trees, breathless, the grouse leads us steady as a rope.

I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.

My wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

Dining at Bocuse wasn’t about food, but about pleasure in all its forms.

There are parts of a man that are born again with each of his daughters.

Someday you’ll understand, darling. Everyone will just—vanish!

I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife.

My hands only knew. The painkillers in our mothers’ cabinets.

I sensed that a name defined who I was and would be in the future.

In my sister’s memory, an old woman chased after the oranges.

I usually get my best writing done at night or at the close of day.

Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind.

My grandmother read one of my early stories and warned—don’t force your muse.

It suddenly seemed to her that the world was filled with little miracles. There were moments when love overcame her despair.

I promised to return, but secretly I dreamed of staying in America.

My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me.

Some days are stretched so taut it feels like changing might break us. We feed the baby bitter melon, flower pepper, bloodroot beet. The first snow comes in January, fresh gauze over an old wound.

The graffiti suggests the most essential story of New Haven.

I want these things to have another life, like the old garden behind our house.

i stored away in my mama’s empty perfume bottles smells and stories

These old guitar players were the last pure thing this country produced.

I’d make a tub of mud to keep live crabs. I’d refill it daily.

Teams spend days surveying the damage and label me a mess.

Standing there in our small shadows, we discuss the ways of the dead.

“My brother’s last words to me were about you. Did you know that?”