“Military folks the world over will tell you theirs is not a business of violence…That’s a lie.”

"Imagine having to ask / members of another society / to look for the stolen and subsequently lost / bodies of your own relatives."

"I don't write for critics and reviewers, nor do I cater to a wider audience (by which one usually means a white audience). My work is always addressed to a very small audience: Sri Lankan readers reading in English."

"Molestation did not hurt me as much as shame that surfaces. The point is not whether I experienced pleasure. But will I untie entrapment from trust, self-harm from intimacy."

"Pearl had grown up knowing and not knowing her mother. It happened sometimes: a child raised by an aunt, by grandparents. The mother hovering at the borders of their lives."

Before I discovered this project, I never imagined the drum as anything more than an inert object behind glass, one that I knew belonged to my people but was so far from home that it didn’t have meaning anymore.

Instead, I presented: One large mason jar (32oz) filled with ashes—the remains of my “Morning Pages.” The lid was screwed on tightly, a white label featuring my best penmanship: “RIP Father Figures.”

“Because our dark-haired fathers, wooden rulers snapping in tanned fists, forced us to be great at it.”