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Alison Hawthorne Deming's
most recent book of poetry

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is Genius Loci, which
follows The Monarchs:

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A Poem Sequence, and
Science and Other Poems,

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winner of the Walt Whitman
Award from the Academy

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of American Poets.

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She's also a teacher of
nonfiction and writer

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of nonfiction.

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Her prose works include
Writing the Sacred

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into the Real, The Edges
of the Civilized World,

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and Temporary Homelands.

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And Kore Press, I believe,
has a few of her works

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that she published with
them in the lobby tonight.

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Alison is also former
director of the Poetry Center,

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and an exemplary
steward of the art.

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Throughout her
work, Alison Deming

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is a celebrant of
the natural world--

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its mystery, its splendor,
its fierceness, its frailty,

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and its violent power.

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As an advocate for its
protection and conservation,

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she is ultimately concerned
with the place of humankind

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within the world,
natural and constructed.

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In Writing the
Sacred Into the Real,

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she says, "I believe
we owe nature

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the deep sense of
gratitude that people once

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expressed to their gods.

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The Earth's life is
finite as is my own.

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And these are realities
I accept with sorrow.

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The place and the passage
made sacred by their limits."

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In her most recent
book of poems--

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the spirit of place is
rendered in its essence

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as guardian spirit, and
moments reverent and irreverent

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in Deming's characteristic
juxtaposition

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of the body with the
holy, moments of watching

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and witness, transform into full
bodied meditations that make

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the seen and the unseen real.

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The title sequence-- a
remembrance of an homage

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to the city of Prague
calls us back to the lives

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you never knew the beings of
thoughts real as the realm

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they inhabit.

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"Regeneration of
our inhabited realm

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is possible within
limits," Deming suggests,

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"if humans guard its care."

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Please welcome Alison
Hawthorne Deming.

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[APPLAUSE]

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