1.
I was not popular enough - or at all - when Vanilla Ice was popular to remember who Vanilla Ice is without my husband reminding me. So I don't have a Vanilla Ice key chain.
Rachel Zucker
2.
My poetry definitely comes out of a female body.
Rachel Zucker
3.
Usually I avoid sugar, but sugar is like the most deeply satisfying addictive thing ever.
Rachel Zucker
4.
I really, really fear head injuries. But when people hit their heads in movies or fall down - I can't stop laughing.
Rachel Zucker
5.
I love it when artists talk about process! I love the movie Comedian.
Rachel Zucker
6.
I agree that comedy does a good job - and is often about - stepping over the line - Lenny Bruce, etc. - and that this is important for a lot of poets too. I guess I feel like there has to be depth.
Rachel Zucker
7.
In high school my mother advised me to make my last lines into titles. It was very good advice.
Rachel Zucker
8.
I don't write very much about penises. More than some poets but not perhaps as much as I should.
Rachel Zucker
9.
Penises are literally all around me all the time, and have a lot of influence on the world, on my world.
Rachel Zucker
10.
I almost never do free writing. Unless I am forcing my students to do it.
Rachel Zucker
11.
Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing.
Rachel Zucker
12.
I'm in a hard place now. A very silent place. And I'm struggling to either accept this or drag myself out of it.
Rachel Zucker
13.
Halloween means that young girls dress up in highly sexualized outfits that would never be acceptable if it weren't Halloween.
Rachel Zucker
14.
I don't remember ever dressing up for Halloween but I must have. I do not like dressing up at all.
Rachel Zucker
15.
I do not like candy. I do not like knocking on strangers' doors. I do not like having to deal with the candy disaster that is Halloween. I resent it.
Rachel Zucker
16.
I HATE HALLOWEEN. This makes me VERY unpopular.
Rachel Zucker
17.
I like the way the prose and poetry interact.
Rachel Zucker
18.
I am interested in the movement of my own thoughts and in trying make the poems feel more accurate to experience, including the experience of thinking.
Rachel Zucker
19.
I am only able to be honest. And sometimes my view of the world is pretty dark. But still funny.
Rachel Zucker
20.
Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten.
Rachel Zucker
21.
When I edit the poems - and I do edit, which some people don't mean when they use the term "stream of consciousness" - I'm usually editing toward greater accuracy, which sometimes means more fragmentation, because that is the way I think.
Rachel Zucker
22.
I think it's a huge shortcoming of mine - this disconnect between the world of human and animals. We are animals.
Rachel Zucker
23.
I have a complicated relationship with non-human animals. I've never really been close to one.
Rachel Zucker
24.
I'm fascinated by but afraid of animals.
Rachel Zucker
25.
Lizzie Harris's Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide.
Rachel Zucker
26.
I'm interested in the self. And in the limits and transformations of self. And in self presentation. And in doubt. And in playing with the audience's expectations. But I don't like dressing up like on Halloween.
Rachel Zucker
27.
I have a longing for wilderness and for greenness. I wish I were a person who longed for animals, but I'm not.
Rachel Zucker
28.
I'm even afraid of kittens. They bite too! But I respect animals.
Rachel Zucker
29.
I do not like it when other people dress up. I like everyone to be THEMSELVES.
Rachel Zucker
30.
It's hard for me to find humor in my current non-writing situation.
Rachel Zucker
31.
I love food too much - not because I'm fat but because it's so consumptionistic, etc.
Rachel Zucker
32.
Very little of my time is spent thinking about poetry, except the time I spend in class.
Rachel Zucker
33.
I love narrative and sometimes I feel frustrated with stand-up.
Rachel Zucker
34.
I think humor and terror are very closely related.
Rachel Zucker
35.
One of my greatest anxieties as a mother is head injuries.
Rachel Zucker