Alison Hawthorne Deming – författare

I greatly admire Alison Deming's lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken, I am more taken, by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge. I am amazed, and delighted, by her authority and tenacity. She is of this world; she lives in it, and for better or worse, it is the world she settles for; and she understands that, even if she must rage a little, and sometimes more than a little, she is one of its citizens. Like every original poet, she appears to have sprung full-blown, out of Zeus' head I want to say, but Aphrodite is here as well as Athena, the ocean as well as the mountain. I congratulate her on this fine book., Gerald SternAlison Hawthorne Deming brings to her first collection of verse the kinds of scrupulous observation and clear-eyed analysis that characterize scientific inquiry as well as a poet's eye for the telling moment.Science and Other Poems establishes astonishing parallels between the mute, inexorable processes of the physical universe and the dark mysteries of the human heart, parallels so clearly wrought and convincing that we wonder why we had not recognised them before.""Caffe Trieste"" lays bare the unexamined terror and sorrow that underlie the proliferation of faux fifties kitsch, then strips the veil of spacious grace from the decade and reveals it as it was for those who lived it:. . . bombs spread like bacteria on culture plates,when the cost of a family staying together mightbe Stelanize andhigh-voltage erasures. They're just American, all shine and no pain.In the chilling ""Alliance, Ohio,"" a mother and daughter suddenly find themselves stranded in a world of predators, a poisonous world charged with sexual threat, where every smile, every gesture, drips with sly menace.Yet moments of dislocation can also be cause for rejoicing, as when a speaker, after surprising a bat in the house, is moved to rapture by the sight of the night sky. Every page of Science and Other Poems is alive with startling juxtapositions, eerie parallels, abrupt shifts of tone, and image after image of crystalline perfection, as in this dazzling evocation of soft-shelled crabs: ""their finely stippled bodies that give to the touch, / translucent as Japanese lanterns.""These poems imbue everything, from the microscopic to the stellar, with wonder. Each instant of illumination, like poetry itself, brings the world alive with ""a faithfulness deeper than seeing.

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in this world is matched only by the diversity of stories explaining our cultural origins: stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. With writing from Jamaica Kincaid on the fallacies of national myths, Yusef Komunyakaa connecting the toxic legacy of his hometown, Bogalusa, LA, to a blind faith in capitalism, and bell hooks relating the quashing of multiculturalism to the destruction of nature that is considered "unpredictable" -- amongst more than 35 other examinations of the relationship between culture and nature -- this collection points toward the trouble of ignoring our cultural heritage, but also reveals how opening our eyes and our minds might provide a more livable future. The Colors of Nature comes in four alternating-color covers: red, yellow, green, and blue.

Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world -- both as physical beings and spiritual symbols -- and not returning. In this collection of linked essays, Alison Hawthorne Deming asks, and seeks to answer: what does the disappearance of animals mean for human imagination and existence? Moving from mammoth hunts to dying house cats, she explores profound questions about what it means to be animal. What is inherent in animals that leads us to destroy, and what that leads us toward peace? As human animals, how does art both define us as a species and how does it emerge primarily from our relationship with other species? The reader emerges with a transformed sense of how the living world around us has defined and continues to define us in a powerful way.

Animals have long been a source of inspiration, sustenance, and companionship, and poems about and for animals are among the oldest traditions across human cultures. This collection of contemporary poems adds to this ancient lineage, celebrating animals for their beauty and intelligence; empathizing over their suffering; and hoping for their future, which is entwined with our own. The presence of an animal is a gift. The loss of an animal is a grief. To share such feelings through poetry is to create a community of caring for the creatures that accompany us on Earth. The Gift of Animals includes poems by some of today's most beloved poets, including Ellen Bass, Lucille Clifton, Michael Collier, Toi Derricotte, Rita Dove, Camille Dungy, Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Arthur Sze, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ada Limón, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Craig Santos Perez, Paisley Rekdal, and more.

“A rich catalog of the Anthropocene, including history, research, and initiative.”—Ellen Bass, author of In IndigoEssential poems devoted to the power of language to pull us closer to Nature and each other.In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert’s spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation.The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds “light having an edge over darkness.” Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming’s poems pay homage to “every organism’s joy to thrive,” every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.