"What is new is not what we tell, but how we tell it. The lyric essay is one way to do this: it demands (or perhaps gently asks, with a knowing smile) that we stay awake to the chance associations and intuitive connections that make life bearable. Or really, to be more precise, it asks us to create those very connections through the act of writing, to follow a chain of those connections as far as they will go and pinch them together in the end." - Brenda Miller, from her Essay, "A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay"