[APPLAUSE]
Hi.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at a coffee shop,
reading a book.
A man approached a young woman at the table next to me,
told her he had noticed her from across the patio,
and asked if he could sit down.
They began a conversation.
I began to eavesdrop, only now pretending to read my book,
eager to see if sparks would fly.
The man began to tell his life story.
He told her that earlier this year,
his grandmother had passed.
A month after that, his uncle too had passed.
That word exactly, "passed," not passed away, not died.
That was how he referred to death.
It was then that I wished that the book I had with me
was Brent Hendricks's A Long Day at the End of the World.
I would have stood up, walked over to them,
and place it on their table like an antique.
For what does it mean to say that someone has passed, to say
even that someone has died?
How do we discuss this?
How do we write about it?
We would be wise to write about it
the way Brent Hendricks does.
A Long Day at the End of the World
chronicles not just the death of Hendricks's father,
but his re-death, the desecration
of his body alongside hundreds of others
at the Tri-State Crematory in rural Georgia.
It chronicles Hendricks's own journey across the state
to the site of this mass desecration.
His long day's drive in the face of collapsed and crunched time.
Throughout, Hendricks writes without mincing words.
He writes with calmness, and precision, and humor
even when he writes with passion, and fervor,
and undiluted pain--
when he writes a howl, and then a moan, and then a wail.
He writes with conviction, but without blame.
At times, when he observes how the world arranges or collapses
in on itself, he writes with real rapture.
He writes knowing that we become more alive in the opening unto
death, knowing that when we become death for a moment,
it is the most a body can do.
He writes that this, in the end, is you or will be--
your body, a cenotaph to oblivion's home.
If this sounds like poetry, it's because it is.
It's because Brent Hendricks is not only a non-fiction writer,
but a poet.
Brent is many things.
He's a graduate of Harvard Law School,
and the MFA program here at the University of Arizona.
He is the author of Thaumatrope, a book of poems.
He is a star tennis player, and musician.
According to our own lovely Kate Bernheimer,
Brent spent his adolescent years playing and winning
competitive tennis matches in a tracksuit and headband,
straight out of The Royal Tenenbaums,
with the same haircut he has now.
And early in the 21st century, he played keyboards
in a Portland, Oregon band called Television Eye,
opening for Richmond Fontaine and The Dandy Warhols.
A thaumatrope, by the way, is a visual illusion,
a toy card with a different picture on each side.
For example, a bird on one and a cage on the other.
When the card is twirled, the images combine.
The bird appears contained in the cage.
The seemingly disparate is housed in one another.
Because of this, a thaumatrope was known as a wonder turner.
What's most remarkable about A Long Day
at the End of the World is what's
most unremarkable about the man at the coffee shop story.
That man told a story about himself only.
But as a long day progresses, we see
all that is really contained in Hendricks's writing.
We see the South and its history,
down to Hernando de Soto and the roadside wildflowers.
We see the way we have treated and tortured the land.
Through the alchemy of images, we see a story of Revelation
and ultimately apocalypse.
And who turns this tale into a rising summons?
I'm going to do what Brent Hendricks never does.
And that is make the easy, obvious analogy.
Brent Hendricks is a wonder turner.
It is my honor to introduce to you the rapturous,
the revelatory, the alchemical, the disarmingly
tall and strikingly handsome Brent Hendricks.
[APPLAUSE]