Welcome, everybody.
I'm very happy that you're here tonight,
and we're delighted to welcome Lynn Emanuel.
She's been on the tour of Arizona for a few days.
She's read up at ASU in Tempe, and at Yavapai college
up in Prescott.
So she may be a bit road weary, but we're
delighted that we managed to get her here nonetheless.
Lynn Emanuel is the author of three books of poetry,
Oblique Light, published by Slow Loris Press, Hotel Fiesta,
published by the University of Georgia,
and most recently, The Dig, published
by the University of Illinois.
That book was chosen by Gerald Stern
as one of five books published in the 1992 National Poetry
Series competition.
Lynn currently is an associate professor
at the University of Pittsburgh.
Molly Peacock says that Emanuel writes
in the tradition of the poet Empress Li Qingzhao,
exploring feminine wiles, only the wiles
here are born of poverty in the American West.
I'm not sure about the empress business, or the feminine wiles.
If forced to make a big claim, I'd
say that Emanuel has brought dirt poor Ely,
Nevada into American poetics in the way
that Frank O'Hara brought New York City into American poetics.
She writes both frontal and charged narrative poems,
like "The Planet Krypton" and some
which are pleasingly oblique, such as the poem, "We,
the Poems of America," in which the poems call themselves runs
of bad luck trying to make the connection between you
and the small potatoes.
We're delighted that Lynn is here.
Please welcome Lynn Emanuel.
[APPLAUSE]