From a poet and essayist whose writing about nature has won her comparisons with Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams comes a new collection that offers further evidence of her ability to trace the intersections of the human and nonhuman worlds. The title poem is a lyrical excavation of the city of Prague, where layers of history, culture and nature have accumulated to form “a genius loci”—a guardian spirit.

Genius Loci (Penguin Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Deming, Alison Hawthorne

Poetry

Penguin??Books

A new collection from a poet who “writes with scrupulous and merciful passion about every kind of relatedness—family, place, politics, and wildlife” (W. S. Piero) In her fifth book of poems, Stairway to Heaven, Alison Hawthorne Deming explores dimensions of grief and renewal after losing her brother and mother. Grounded in her communion with nature and place, she finds even in Death Valley, that most stark of landscapes, a spirit of inventiveness that animates the ground we walk on. From the cave art of Chauvet to the futuristic habitat of Biosphere 2, that inventiveness becomes consolation for losses in family and nature, a means to build again a sense of self and world in the face of devastating loss.

Stairway to Heaven: Poems (Penguin Poets)

Genre Fiction

New from a poet renowned for her lyricism, wisdom, and originality Alison Hawthorne Deming ’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, and the search for extraterrestrial life, all linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity—virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem “The Flight,” inspired by the works of A. R. Ammons, is a twenty-first century epic poised on the verge of our discovering life beyond Earth.

Rope (Penguin Poets)

The author discusses four locales that have connections with her life: the northeast woods, a Canadian island off the coast of Alaska, southeast Alaska, and the American Southwest

Temporary Homelands

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Picador USA

The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture

Looks at civilization's progress and ways to strike a balance between nature and the world's population

Sociology

Troubled by tensions that inevitably arise when civilization intrudes upon wild regions, Alison Hawthorne Deming visited some of our continent's most remote areas to answer questions that had long been on her mind. In the absence of vast frontiers, can we manage our ever-increasing numbers? How can we strike a balance with a natural world that we threaten by our very presence? With the language of a poet and the eye of a scientist, Alison Hawthorne Deming presents us with the difficult challenge of redefining our traditional notion of cultural progress and thinking of our future in new terms.

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Picador

Winner of the 1993 Walt Whitman Award, given annually by the Academy of American Poets to a first collection of poetry. The final judge for the 1993 competition was Gerald Stern. Paper edition (unseen) $9.95. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Science and Other Poems

Louisiana State Univ Pr

“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 Stern Alison 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 recognized 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 might be Stelanize and high-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.”

Science and Other Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

LSU Press

The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Deming, Alison Hawthorne. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Deming, Alison Hawthorne

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Deming, Alison Hawthorne. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Genius Loci (Penguin Poets)

Stairway to Heaven: Poems (Penguin Poets)

Rope (Penguin Poets)

Temporary Homelands

The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture

The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture

Science and Other Poems

Science and Other Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence

The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence