These two, the fierceness and the beauty wrestle with one another in this book. I wanted to hold them up to the light to give people courage, inspiration, hope, a sense of not being alone. I wanted to make a thing of beauty and truth, to make the invisible visible, to give voice to the unsayable, and to speak eloquently for those who struggle to find the worlds for their feelings and experiences. I want to wake people up to greater aliveness. I believe poems can do this in an extraordinary way, casting a magical spell with worlds that awakens feelings, memories, imagination, sensations and calls us to greater being.

I have always found the invisible and imaginal worlds—the worlds of emotions, spirits and imagination—to be vividly alive for me, even more than the apparent physical world. So, I have had a driving need to capture that ineffable wonder and strangeness on the page in some way, while also honoring the physical world. These things aren’t, in fact, separate. I have been called a poet of praise more than once, and I consider that a great honor. I have also been called a radical.

These paradoxes are what Fierce Aria is all about.