"In college, I took a poetry class with Jorie Graham, an amazing poet. She directed me to Hass, and his stuff moved me so much. His writing is very American, spare, clean. And manly. There’s a ruggedness to his poems. One in particular I’ve always loved is called ‘Dragonflies Mating.’ It combines a sense of abandonment in childhood with natural images. I don’t even know exactly what it means, but I think that’s what poetry does—it evokes all these feelings without our really understanding why or how it’s done."

"The Japanese New Wave is almost synonymous with Nagisa Oshima. His film In the Realm of the Senses outraged critics and audiences alike with its many scenes of unsimulated sex. Here he takes similar themes of lust and murderous passion and explores them through the supernatural, crafting a ghost story that puts Japanese society and cultural conventions on trial in a masterful way. Who are the criminals here? Those who dare to pursue their feelings and impulses, or the society that forbids them the freedom to do just that?"