Kidspeak

Where does Kateri Lanthier get her best material? Her kids.

I certainly steal from my kids. There's a lot of kidspeak and kidthink in [Reporting from Night]—while I worked on it, I was listening to under-fives acquire language, collide images, fracture expressions and coin words. It was delectable. I followed them around with a notebook to capture what they said. Some poems draw on "life," in terms of settings or scenarios, but I think the greater debt is to the way kids speak. "As we strolled past the mannequins,/ you said, "This is the fashion store/ for ladies with no heads." And "Moon, moon, help me, I'm stuck!" or "On the snow hill, you say/ "We are running/from our footprints." The kid's-eye view started to affect what I saw, so that even when I'm not quoting them, I see things their way: "Mitten foliage is scattered by the door./ The floor wears many hats."