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: 1994

"Pigsty for a brain, / Stop them from making faces at each other / In the mirror!"

— Simic, Charles (b. 1938)

Date: 1995

"Soul is the place, / stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, / where such necessity grinds itself out"

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"I came / again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, // until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down / on the two souls clasped there on the bed /with their mortal boundaries // visible around them like lines on a map."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

But the Nudes are still as clear in my mind / as pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou / not as a display of power but to force out of herself some pity / for this soul trapped in glass, / which is her true creation."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 2000

"It's the death of your memory I still / cannot fathom: never in such small space / such wealth."

— Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris

Date: 2002

"There is the story of the mind's temperature neither cold nor celibate."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 2003

"Believe the fallen leaf / from one world floats there, / in another, tawny star on the black water, / the soul's cradle, / even when he must pause / to rest his racing heart, / & cannot see it?"

— Spaar, Lisa Russ

Date: 2004

"Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)