OK, this is, like, my one contribution to sustainability,
and I brought my own water bottle.
You just know, just know.
I drove my car here.
I turned the heat up when I left my house, but no water bottles.
This place is sacred to me, the Poetry Center.
I read here once when Quench Your Thirst With Salt came out,
and I've been here for other readings.
And it's particularly important to me because of the people
who come.
So I want to think Ander and Manuel and Alison
for being here.
And Karen Brennan is at the back.
Karen-- there's Karen Brennan.
She was my professor at the University of Utah,
and now she lives in Tucson.
And it means so much to me that she's here.
And Jesse Sensibar, who came down from Flagstaff,
and [? Haley ?] [? Wetzel, ?] who's my student from NAU.
But not just the people I can name,
and Simmons Buntin, who published,
I think, the first essay in this book and the first essay
that was published from this book in Terrain.
But it's not just the people I can name,
but this place is high bar for me.
This is the place where I feel, when I'm writing,
that this is my audience, that these are the people who
will get what I'm doing and will forgive my flaws
and I hope embrace the humor and embrace the seriousness
and embrace the sort of devastating elements
of this book and then also the way that I'm flippant
and sort of sarcastic to boot.
If there's one people that I feel like I'm writing for,
it's the people here.
So I hope that works out as I actually begin reading.
It worked out well when I read from my last book,
but I read a lot of sex parts, and there's not
as much sexiness in this book, although Ander
says there's some.
And I'll try to, like, sex it up.
When we're talking about otters, I'll be like, ooh, sexy otters!
And Aurelie's here.
Hello, Aurelie.
I'm so happy to see you.
And Patri, who is so well hosting me
at the Poetry Center, and I'm staying in the cottage.
And it's such a beautiful space.
Also, my ice in this-- this is not a Hydro Flask.
It's a different brand.
I don't know what happened to it,
but I filled it up with ice, and I took it down
from the top of the Grand Canyon down to the Colorado River.
There was still ice in it.
And everyone was like, Nicole, can I have some of your ice?
[LAUGHTER]
I will not say whether I shared or not.
Perhaps if they had whiskey, I did.
So I'm going to read.
OK, so this is what happened last time I did a reading.
I was, like, I'm going to read one--
or two essays.
And then I just sensed that there was, like,
that's enough, Nicole.
We're good.
So if I sense that that's enough, we're good, we--
I will stop.
But I'm going to read-- my goal is to read two essays.
Plus, I would like to read just a section of one of the essays
because Ander Monson and New Michigan Press
made this broadside.
And it's from an essay in here that I'm not
going to read the whole of because it's pretty long,
but it's about whale poop and McDonald's hamburgers.
And you think, oh, maybe those things don't go together.
But you will see by the end of the essay that they kind of do.
And even if they don't, Ander made
it seem like they do by putting a piece of krill,
which is what the whales eat, and a hamburger.
Krill, hamburger, krill, hamburger.
And illustratively, if not linguistically,
the essay holds together.
All right.
Also, I've been very--
I've been-- since this book came out,
I've been working on this saying this word,
even though REM have an album called this--
"eponymous."