"I was never really much of an avid poetry reader, but for whatever reason Olds really connected with me. I remember reading these poems as a teenager and thinking, ‘Oh, she’s so fucking cool—this is a poem about the Pope’s penis.’ For someone in a very conservative Catholic country, that felt so punk."

"Yeats: say no more. I’m of Irish ancestry so the world of Yeats is magical, mournful and evocative of a faraway time and place familiar to my soul. I often love to read these poems aloud to myself late at night. My favorite is “The Second Coming,” with its prescient warning to our world today."

"This book brought me to poetry; I could never read it enough. Celan’s poems are a radiant reminder of the most desolate events that can attend humankind (i.e. the Holocaust, suicidal despair) and its most resplendent features (the near mystical possibilities of poetic language, of intimacy). “Single counter- / swimmer, you / count them, touch them / all.’”"

"I’ve read all of Poe’s poetry as well as Lord Byron’s and Oscar Wilde’s. He is deep and brooding – you can make many songs from his poems. I like Byron for the same reason – his characters are dark and intense like Lindsey. Oscar Wilde’s work is more flamboyant, but he was a really good storyteller."

"When his estranged wife Emma died, she became Hardy’s muse, which irritated his new wife to no end. At 72, he became the magisterial, full-fledged poet he always thought himself to be. The Emma poems are elegiac, restrained, transcendent. He was buried in Poet’s Corner; his heart was removed and buried with the dead spouse."