Nonfiction
The first time a poem really enraptured me, I was twelve. In a thin, gray-paper anthology of poetry, I read Sylvia Plath鈥檚 poem, The Night Dances. It made me riotous and cosmically dizzy. I felt the warmth coming off me like Plath鈥檚 comets, bleeding and peeling all over the place. When you鈥檙e twelve, it鈥檚 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 鈥渢he black amnesias of heaven.鈥 It was the first poem I memorized.