Hello, everyone.
Welcome.
Hello, hello, hello.
Hi everybody.
Can you hear me OK?
Yes.
You can?
Can you hear me in the back?
Great.
Thumbs up.
That's a lot of thumbs up.
Thanks for that.
I'm a fan of thumbs up.
So that was really exciting.
Great to have so many folks here.
If you're coming in and there's not-- it's hard to find seats,
there's a few more that are over here in the stack.
So if you need an extra seat, come over here where Julie is.
There's extra seats there.
A few more left.
It's pretty awesome to have a reading where
all the seats are taken.
So thanks for doing this.
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And lovely to see so many faces on a Thursday night in Tucson.
It feels on the cusp, before we're all
about to be very, very hot together,
and so thanks for this moment of coolness that we get to share.
We are cool.
We're here at a poetry reading on Thursday
at the Poetry Center, so.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the Director of the Poetry Center.
It's a great pleasure to welcome everybody.
And so thank you so much for coming.
We are so thrilled to have Jane Hirshfield back in Tucson.
[APPLAUSE]
Jane and I were talking earlier about
that we need to do this more frequently.
So we'll have her back again soon.
And we're really thrilled that she's here now
to share work with us from amazing recent work and all
the way back throughout her whole oeuvre,
and so we're so grateful.
She brought two very beautiful broadsides to the Poetry Center
as a gift, and so if you have a chance
to come visit us at the Poetry Center, please ask to see them.
Both are poems from her most recent collection of book
and they're beautiful treatments in broadside format.
The title poem, "Ledger," and then the poem,
also, "Let Them Not Say."
And they're both beautifully presented in the broadside
format, so I hope you'll come and check that out.
A couple of things.
I want to say very quickly just about upcoming programs
at the Poetry Center, if there are children
in your life, your own or others,
and you might like to bring them to a poetry-themed event
or program on the 22nd of this month of April,
we'll have the return of our Kids Create program,
where we turn the entire library over
to kids for most of the day.
And so it's a wonderful experience,
and it's especially targeted for kids
who are infant up to age 10.
And we will have a performance at that time
from the theatrical group Stories That Soar.
So if you know that group, it's a really exciting time
and it's a lot of fun, and so that's on the 22nd back
here at the Poetry Center at 10:00 AM.
I hope you'll come join us and bring some children with you.
There's a brand new exhibit at the Poetry Center right now
called Cut and Paste, and it's an exhibit that
features the work of zines, zine culture and zine making,
and it's a really wonderful exploration of that form
and the work that happens in that space.
And there are so many great creators here
in Tucson who are using that form
and those materials, and this exhibit
tells some of that story, as well as broadly how that
fits in the culture of zine making in the country.
And so please come see that as well.
That's available while the Poetry Center is open.
Our last reading of the season with visiting writers
will be on the 27th of the month, of this month,
and that will feature-- that's the Distinguished Visiting
Writers Series in partnership with the MFA program,
and it will feature the writers Jennifer Elise Foerster
and Michael Wasson, and that's here
at 7:00 at the Poetry Center.
Again the 27th, back here, free and for all of you
we'd love to see you back in this space.
Books are for sale after the reading over here inside,
and so there are still some left.
I know a lot of them have been sold already.
So if you're interested in purchasing a book afterwards,
we hope that you will.
Jane is happy to sign them after the reading.
And we request that you might wear a mask when
you come into the signing line.
And so if you need a mask or don't have one,
we have some more that are available over at the book
sales table, and that will help us and support Jane
as she's doing a lot of traveling right now.
We want to keep everybody safe and supported.
So thanks for doing that.
It's, again, a really big thrill to have
Jane back here in Tucson, and to help introduce her
we have another wonderful poet and presenter to help
do that work.
And I'm really excited to ask the poet
and essayist Katherine Larson to come up to the podium now.
Katherine's book Radial Symmetry, her poetry book,
was a Yale Younger Poets pick and a new collection
of essays that's titled Wedding of the Foxes--
Did I get that right?
Yeah, good.
Wedding of the Foxes is just being submitted.
Final edits are happening, a book
of essays with Milkweed Editions.
So it will be out in the next maybe year, year and a half.
And so it's my great pleasure to welcome up Katherine Larson.
Thanks so much, Katherine.
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