Hello, thank you all for coming.
Woah, jeez, technology.
Yeah, that's OK.
Anyway thank you all for coming.
Thank you Allie, for the very nice introduction.
And thank you, Naomi, for sharing your beautiful work.
It's an honor to share the podium with you tonight.
I'd also like to thank the board, the administration,
the staff, and the judges of the Arizona Poetry Center,
for giving me this opportunity.
It's really been tremendous for me.
Not only have I been able to do a lot of writing
and reading and experiencing your beautiful library,
I've been able to immerse myself in a southwestern landscape
that I'm going to miss.
As Allie said, I'm getting ready to shuffle on over to Richmond.
And this time here has been something I sorely
needed a good send off.
The sun and the heat and the sand and the bugs.
All that stuff I'm going to miss.
So I really appreciate the opportunity.
And I won't forget it, and thank you.
So tonight, I would like to read from my book
Descanso for My Father, and as some of you in the room
may know, descanso in Spanish, means resting place.
And in New Mexico, a descanso is also
the name for a roadside shrine.
These kinds of memorials you might see on your drive
from Chimayo to Taos, or Albuquerque to Las Cruces,
with flowers and rosaries and votive candles.
And in New Mexico a descanso means a couple of things.
Not only does it mean--
not only does it mark the ground of somebody who has died,
I believe it's also a testament to the living.
Descanso was a place where two spirits come together
in communion, in healing and love, I think.
And that's certainly my intention with this book here,
descanso in my book is a memoir in a series
of connected shorts.
And each essay, each prose poem, and each lyric essay
is an offering on the descanso shrine
to the father I never knew.
A man who for a lot of complicated reasons,
we never talked about growing up.
So with this book it was a gesture
on my behalf to try and touch his spirit,
and to try and understand a little bit.
So I would like to read three short excerpts from my book.
Three offerings if you will, and hopefully give you a little
insight into my strange and beautiful little family.
So with that, I would like to start with an excerpt
from an essay in the collection called
"Among the Broken Angels."