Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo’s finger in the church of Santa Croce, but Edison’s last breath is an invisible relic.

— Elizabeth Alexander

I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept, and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?

— Elizabeth Alexander

In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.

— Elizabeth Alexander

In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.

— Elizabeth Alexander

It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop-dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty, but they also graph to stress known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

— Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry is where we are ourselves, (though Sterling Brown said"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")digging in the clam flats for the shell that snaps, emptying the proverbial pocketbook. Poetry is what you finding the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, Godwin the details, the only way to get from here to there. Poetry (and now my voice is rising)is not all love, love, Loveland I'm sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?

— Elizabeth Alexander

Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space.

— Elizabeth Alexander

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance. In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

— Elizabeth Alexander