“I don’t listen to music when I write. I like silence. My mind fills with whispered words from other writers. Sometimes the words are from books, sometimes music, sometimes poetry. I remembered my favorite poems as I wrote ALL BEAUTIFUL THINGS. This is my poetry soundtrack.”
–Nicki Salcedo
- “We wear the mask that grins and lies. It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.” Paul Laurence Dunbar, Poem: “We Wear the Mask”
- “And then last night I tiptoed up to my daughter’s room and heard her talking to someone, and when I opened the door, there was no one there…Only she on her knees, peeking into her own clasped hands” Amiri Baraka, Poem: “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”
- “We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, and bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, and we gave her all our money but our subway fares.” Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poem: “Recuerdo”
- “How you must have wondered to see me taking chances, dancing on the edge of words, pointing out the bad guys, dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me.” Lucille Clifton, Poem: “note passed to superman”
- “Her terrified hands will lie still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.” Adrienne Rich, Poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
- “And now the moon, earth’s friend, that cared so much for us, and cared so little, comes again—always a stranger!” Robert Lowell, Poem: “Public Garden”
- “In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me. Not of woods only and the shade of trees.” Robert Frost, Poem: “Mending Wall”
- “Don’t look now. I’m fading away into the gray of my mornings or the blues of every night.” Nikki Giovanni, Poem: “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day”
- “I lay waiting on the gravel bottom, my brain darkening, a jar of spawn fermenting underground dreams of Baltic amber.” Seamus Heaney, Poem: “Bog Queen”
- “In the mirror, the angles of the room are calm, it is the hour when you can see that the angle itself is blessed, and the dark globes of the chandelier, suspended in the mirror, are motionless” Sharon Olds, Poem: “After Making Love in the Winter”
- “I have slept with you all night long while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead, and on waking suddenly in the midst of the shadow my arm encircled your waist. Neither night nor sleep could separate us.” Pablo Neruda, Poem: “Night on the Island”
- “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” Sylvia Plath, Poem: “Lady Lazarus”
- “They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs.” James Wright, Poem: “A Blessing”
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