OK.
Picture Katherine Larson again.
It's a great pleasure to welcome up and introduce our friend
Alison Hawthorne Deming, the award winning poet, nonfiction
writer, naturalist, and champion of the Poetry Center
here at the University of Arizona.
A Guggenheim fellow, Deming has two books of poetry
that are just out and for sale over here: The Gift Of Animals:
Poems Of Love, Loss, And Connection,
and the poetry collection, Blue Flax And Yellow Mustard Flower.
Her other poetry collections include Stairway
To Heaven, Death Valley: Painted Light, Genius Loci,
The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, and Rope.
Her nonfiction books include A Woven World:
On Fashion, Fishermen And The Sardine Dress, Zoologies:
On Animals And The Human Spirit, and Temporary Homelands,
as well as The Edges Of The Civilized World,
which was a finalist for the PEN Center West award,
and Writing The Sacred Into The Real
from Milkweed's Credo series.
Her work has earned numerous awards, including
fellowships from the MacDowell Colony,
the National Endowment for the Arts
and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
The latter two, both agencies that we hope
will continue to exist into the future.
Tonight, she'll read from her latest collection, Blue Flax
And Yellow Mustard Flower.
Deming's poems are a poignant homage to scientific curiosity
and the deft musicality of language,
stretching from the mind to the cosmos.
Intimate pandemic meditations to impassioned letters to America.
Prose poems to the Spanish décima,
demonstrating a dazzling, formal and imagistic virtuosity.
In this collection, we journey through diverse worlds,
from the beady skinned iguanas of the Galápagos
to the post-funeral memorials of Fidel in Havana.
From Merwin's hidden sanctuary of forgotten trees
to Neil Armstrong's recorded heartbeat as his foot touches
the silky powder of the moon's surface.
One of the epigraphs of Blue Flax And Yellow Mustard Flower
is taken from Bruno Latour's Down To Earth.
And Latour says, this is a quote,
"All that counts is understanding whether you are
managing to register, to maintain,
to cherish a maximum number of alternative ways of belonging
in the world."
End quote.
In this collection, Deming does just
that, using poetry's plurality to invite readers
to see belonging as an active, intentional act of attention,
care, questioning, resistance, elegy, and celebration.
Her poems are as at home in the earthy darkness of an island
plagued by invasive Leopard slugs
as they are with the Athenian cats basking
in the ruins of antiquity, or the glassy,
protocol space of the American embassy in Madrid,
surrounded by armed guards.
Belonging is everywhere, Deming's poems seem to argue,
just as they demonstrate how to carry
the generative space of inquiry to all places and beings.
Please help me welcome our friend, Alison Hawthorne Deming.
[APPLAUSE]