My lifelong relationship with poetry began at five with my mother’s reading A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six—“They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace/Christopher Robin went down with Alice” to me, which delighted me so much, I, in turn, propped my dolls up in chairs and performed those same lines for them. My grandmother from Kiev would recite Pushkin in Russian from memory, the two of us cuddling together on the couch in her dark living room. I didn’t understand a word, but the music of the verse, the joy and passion in her recitation, was like a trap door—a room from which I never wanted to emerge.