Date: 1990

"now you see the / two doctors, behind / you, in mind's eye, / probe into your anus, / or ass, or bottom, / behind you, the roto- / rooter-like device / sees all up, concludes / 'like a worn-out inner tube'"

— Creeley, Robert (1926-2005)

Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1991

"Zulu Nation, brothers that's creation; / Minds get flooded, ejaculation -- / Right on the two inch tape."

— Tribe Called Quest [Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jarobi White]

Date: 1992

"Now it would be folly to deny that human beings can keep their thoughts secret, can talk to themselves without making any noise, can sketch figures before their mind's eye instead of on pieces of paper."

— Kenny, Anthony (b. 1931)

Date: 1992

"Indigestion tablets, thought Victor, belching softly, to help break down the doughy bulk of sensation?"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1994

"Pigsty for a brain, / Stop them [the body and soul] from making faces at each other / In the mirror!"

— Simic, Charles (b. 1938)

Date: 1996

"One would expect, then, that such a political period would be rife with various veins of pseudo-mysticism, enamoured of whatever gives the slip to the concept, enthralled by those spasms of mind which confound its customary distinctions, which breed in us some ecstatic state of indeterminacy in ...

— Eagleton, Terry (b. 1943)

Date: 1997

"He does not want to know. So much does he not want to know that he can feel a hand go up inside his own head to block his ears, block his sight."

— Coetzee, J. M. (b. 1940)

Date: 1997

"Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)