Your selected poems are compiled from several books over the last twenty(ish) years. How would you describe your work’s evolution? Are there changes that struck you, personally, as you selected?

A selected poems is a story. By focusing on your strongest and most representative poems, you create a streamlined version of your development. Any unevenness, therefore, is collapsed into a clean, confident timeline. A different editor, however, might come up with a different story after combing through the same books. Here’s what I found. Early on, I built poems artisanally. I looked for interesting ideas or objects and worked them up, word by word. There was a premium on formal control, freshness of approach, surprise. It didn’t matter what the poem was about, as long as it was vigorously done. When preparing Dirty Words, I was struck by how dramatically all that changed with my third book, This Way Out. The poems are mined from my life, they react to my surroundings, they reflect aspects of my thinking back at me. The style isn’t an end in itself. Instead, it’s a means, often taking the shape of an observation in the process of clarifying itself. The phrasing is more exploratory, the sense of form intuited and improvised. Some of that is due to confidence; I’m more comfortable taking risks. Mostly I chalk it up to changes in my life—the shift to playgrounds, mortgages and terminal wards—that made me intolerant of anything that smacked of fakery. The harder thing, I now realize, is saying something simple well.

How has your publishing and editorial work impacted your own writing?

Publishing and editing has given me a living, so I feel incredibly lucky to do it. There are downsides. It steals time away from your own writing. Your head fills up with other voices, and it can take a little longer to find your way back to your own. But editing also made me a better writer. It sharpened my eye for bad habits, lazy phrasing, and slipshod writing. I also panic less. Fixing other people’s problems gives me confidence that I can fix my own. It’s also funny how much traffic travels between the two roles. I’ve used tricks I’ve picked up in my own poems when I edit other poetry and, in turn, other manuscripts have taught me lessons that influence my own process. What’s key is to make sure that, when you’re at the writing table, the editing side doesn’t have the upper hand. The creative state is an error-prone state: you want to feel free to make mistakes, mistakes that can spark useful ideas, the kind of ideas that can lead to other useful ideas. And because you’re playing a long game, your sense of time is different. You have no real deadline. No one is waiting for you to file. That means you can live with the poem a bit longer and give yourself permission to test out certain strategies. Getting it right means budgeting in enough time for missteps. What you don’t need is an inner voice constantly barking: that can’t work.

Your earlier poems seem to examine form, language, and poetic tradition, while later poems centre on fatherhood, masculinity, and family. Would you describe your subjects as preoccupations? What continues to capture your attention?

Maybe what is most surprising about Dirty Words is how consistent my concerns have been. Even when I focused on form and language, as you put it, I was obsessed with male codes. I found it easy to tap into the sadness and frustration behind those codes. These emotions were often bound up with the story of what my family left behind when settling here. More specifically, my idea of immigration was shaped by the paterfamilias who surrounded me when I was growing up; the sense of duty that came from being the head of a family and of providing for it at all cost. My uncles prospered in Canada, but they also paid an emotional price: loss of a country, of a culture, of a shared past. They made a life here, but it was never really home. And that sense seeped into my work. I dwell on disappointment, dreams deferred, and the brutal clarity that can come from failure. In my sometimes-painful transition to midlife, the stories of the men in my life have become my own stories: the bottom-scraping sense of unfulfillment: the what-ifs that constantly run thought your head, the longing for do-overs that follow every setback. That’s how I see my poems: as the product of doubt-ridden self-knowledge. So if Dirty Words is about anything, it’s about yearning for the right answers to the big questions, but knowing none exist.