As a poet by trade, which is what I would c consider myself more than a writer of prose, I think that every poet is looking for the jewel inherent in each moment and memory. Whether it is a shoddy stone or a bright sparkling thing, it is the jewel of the moment that we try to capture with our words. To do so economically and with precision is even better. We write draft after draft, shearing off the fat, cutting off the words again and again until we have that clearly defined stone that we can examine. Poetry is the meter and rhyme that we carry in every step we walk. It carries us through the day and it is the tune we hum in our head and for me, it says more than any snapshot. Put the two together and you have a whole story. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a good poem is written with few words and is worth many thousands. I had never written the subjects covered in the France poems and certainly, my previous writing had been nothing like the tone found here. These were of a person who burns bright butane blue and is pale and waxed holy and wholly fallible and full foibles. She is also, like me, someone who needs very little to survive. Everything in Paris taught me that.

The biggest lesson I had learned was that you don't need to live big to live large. That one could wear the same outfit every single day, the same shoes, no makeup , none of the excessive that I felt I needed back here, and since I had grown up in Europe and am still, legally, European, it was a homecoming for me. I felt so much more at home in France than I ever had in Americ