Michele Glazer's new book Aggregate of Disturbances has been called "a stunning collecion of meditations on language, landscape and loss." The poems in this book, her second, are never at rest - they push and pull at language, and offer images that seem to shift as soon as they are encountered. In Glazer's poems, "the full moon tells a story/a chronology of movement/toward the center and out again." She teaches at Portland State University and was kind enough to answer some questions. Caffeine Destiny: The title of your book, AGGREGATE OF DISTURBANCES, makes me think of so many things. I think the "disturbances" in this book are often that moment when we realize something important has taken place and the only way we can express it is through language, which often fails us; writing then becomes another disturbance. Does any of that resonate with you and what the title means to you? Michele Glazer: "Disturbances" are, for me, inklings and rifts and weather and such. Sometimes the "disturbance" exists first in language, and then it is followed and teased out. You're right to add that language often fails us. Language seems always inadequate. And more than enough. Caffeine Destiny: I'm intrigued by the lines at the end of the first poem, "2 Blinds & a Bittern: "It's easy to love a thing against the sky but you can't just look at one thing and say,/ 'oh, it's a redtail.' It has to all add up." That "add up" at the end reminds me of the "aggregate" from the title. Does that feel intentional to you? Do you think part of what the poems do in this book is try to "add up" experience? Michele Glazer:The title came from a phrase in another poem but I like the connection you suggest. I'm aware of wanting the definitiveness of things adding up while at the same time being skeptical about the possibility and uncomfortable with the assertion of "certainty." Mostly. I expect that my poems try to make meaning out of experience by acts of accretion --- without quite adding up. "Adding" suggests culmination in an unassailable sum. I can sometimes just manage to confirm a sighting. I like the poem "Fragment's Song" very much. Can you say something about poets' attraction to the fragment? I appreciate the fragment's capacity to contain contradiction, and therefore to feel large enough to satisfy the suggestion of movement towards both completion and disintegration. Of course everything's a fragment. If you want to look at it that way. What are you working on now? I'm trying to give myself a more cohesive project for a manuscript. Right now I like the athleticism possible in a prose poem. What is the revision process like for you? How many poems do you write a few drafts of and then abandon and never go back to? Revising is a pleasure. It means messing around with the materiality of language and in the process, finding connections. I keep all my drafts in case I want to borrow from myself. I also keep work that's so unfinished, "draft" would be a stretch. A poem may be abandoned but I have no qualms about going back to scavenge. I know there have been times when you've had different jobs besides teaching. Can you say a little bit about how teaching or not teaching dovetails with your life as a writer? In my years with the Nature Conservancy, my writing life and my work life were disjunctive, but not unhappily so. Though I expected to have more regular work hours than I ever did, and to develop regular writing habits, which I also never did. What success I had as a writer had no bearing on my job. What the Conservancy allowed me, primarily, was access to new metaphors and systems and ways of looking at the world. My life as a teacher feels more congruent with my life as a writer. I'm part of a community of faculty and students with whom I share obvious interests.