[APPLAUSE]
I'm not going to put my tongue on it,
but is that sound OK, Tony?
Yeah, OK.
So I'm filled with gratitude to be here and for this temple
and for this company.
Though Tucsonans would love to claim
Laynie Browne as our own prodigal daughter,
and this reading as her return, she
hails from other places deeply interior and far, far away.
Laynie explores silences and other kinds of invisibilia
through the recontextualization of poetic forms
like odes, sonnets, tales, letters, psalms, amulets.
But I also like her question making as a form of prayer.
She is a smart querier, her lines of inquiry incantatory.
How does the real manifest in the body?
How do we represent the unsayable?
When realism isn't real, where is a writer to go?
I prayed the dictionary, the poet says.
To quote CA Conrad, her poems do something new to you.
Laynie Browne is the author of 11 collections
of poetry and two novels.
Her work appears in the second edition of the Norton Anthology
of Postmodern American Poetry.
Her newest collection, along with Scorpyn Odes published
by Kore Press earlier this year is Lost Parkour Ps(alms)
published in France in both French and English.
Honors include a Pew Fellowship, a National Poetry Series
selection, a Contemporary Poetry Series selection,
and the Gertrude Stein Award of Innovative Writing.
She is co-editor of I'll Drown My Book--
Conceptual Writing by Women, the idea for which I believe
was hatched in this room during a symposium in 2007
for some of you who might remember that moment.
She also teaches at the University of Pennsylvania
and Swarthmore College.
Please welcome Laynie Browne.