Quotes from Allison Joseph

Poetry is such an ancient art, and I consider myself young within that art.

Something about the turbulence of adolescence makes you want to do something creative...I thought as I got older I would stop writing about it, but I find adolescence, and popular depictions of it, very interesting. I like to see where my own life intersects or diverges from notions of what a teenager is supposed to be, or what a black person is supposed to be, or a woman.

I lived a life I knew I had to hide My father's edicts resolutely grim.

Editing is work, and it's hard to do while working on one's own writing.

Part of elegy is confrontation - not just with the idea of death, but with the person who has died.

Only after my father's death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language.