Alison Hawthorne Deming

“The sustained focus and lyrical engagement of Peter Cunningham’s work has been most profound in his bearing witness to ‘The Rock’ and its people — fishermen, clamdiggers, dulse pickers, worshippers, toddlers, centenarians, shipbuilders and ship wreckers, quilters, and bakers.” — Alison Hawthorne Deming Nestled in the sparkling waters of the Bay of Fundy, Grand Manan Island is a haven of natural beauty, accessible only by ferry, boat, and airplane. For more than a century, visitors have spent the summer months on the Island. Year round, it’s home to a network of communities and a thriving fishery. Peter Cunningham first came to Grand Manan as a child, accompanying his father, who was studying the fog on nearby Kent Island. As a child, he observed how traditional methods of fishing were already changing with the advent of new technologies like fathometers and radar. Today, the pace of change has quickened. Disappearing Before Our Eyes chronicles contemporary island life on Grand Manan, from the fishing industry impacted by new technology, uncertain market conditions, and climate change, to the stories of island residents — the memories of older generations and the hopes of the young. As Cunningham writes, “I’ve been privileged to have lived my life in community with six generations of Grand Mananers. In this book I’m honouring what is disappearing, but also a place teeming with human life and unpredictable promise.”

Winner of the 2024 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize The Deep Blue of Neptune is a striking, meditative collection of poems by Terry Belew, which reminds readers of the necessity of empathy in the midst of uncertain and unsettling times. Set against a rural backdrop, Belew's poems reside in the everyday––driving on gravel backroads, roaming the aisles of Walmart, and doomscrolling on a smart phone––to highlight the contradictory qualities of existence. Belew utilizes a variety of forms, familiar and invented, including free verse, sonnets, sestinas, and "wish lists," to explore his speakers' inner lives. Often haunted by violence, from car crashes to gunshots, these poems are a reflection of how people must navigate the bleak landscape of the digital age. The Deep Blue of Neptune is a masterfully crafted debut, blending lyricism with wry humor to address the complexities of our relationships with other people, with nature, and with ourselves.

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.

Essential 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.

Part memoir, part cultural history, A Woven World celebrates the fading crafts, industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations. The desire to create is the cornerstone of civilization. But as we move into a world where machine manufacturing has nearly usurped craft, Alison Hawthorne Deming resists the erasure of our shared history of handiwork with this appeal for embracing continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change. Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of our founding communities, and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent's "sardine" dress, Deming turned to the industries of her ancestors, both the dressmakers and designers in Manhattan in the nineteenth century and the fishermen on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2,500 residents, where the dignity of work and the bounty of the sea ruled for hundreds of years. Reweaving the fabric of those lives, A Woven World gives presence on the page to the people, places, and practices, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament becomes a song of praise and a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making.

The Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson—whose summit is called Frog Mountain by the Tohono O'odham—offers up to the citizens of the basins below a wilderness in their own backyard. When it was first published in 1987, Frog Mountain Blues documented the creeping sprawl of new development up the Catalinas' foothills. Today, that development is fully visible, but Charles Bowden's prescience of the urgency to preserve and protect a sacred recreational space remains as vivid as ever. Accompanied by Jack W. Dykinga's photographs from the original work, this book continues to convey the natural beauty of the Catalinas and warns readers that this unique wilderness could easily be lost. As Alison Hawthorne Deming writes in the new foreword, ""Frog Mountain Blues continues to be an important book for learning to read this place through the eyes of experience and history, and Bowden remains a sobering voice for facing our failures in protecting what we love in this time of global destruction, for taking seriously the power of language to set ourselves right again with the enormous task of living with purpose and presence and care on the land.

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.

With vivid ideas and passion, Deming writes about the importance of nature writing for these peripatetic times. Descended from the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alison Deming appropriately begins this philosophical autobiography along the shores of the North Atlantic -- on Grand Manan Island, in the Bay of Fundy. Moving on to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to Tucson, Arizona, and Paomoho, Hawaii, Deming describes places that are dear to her because their ways are still shaped by terms nature has set, though less and less so. With vivid ideas and passion, Deming writes about the importance of nature writing for these peripatetic times. Because people's lives are materially less connected to the natural world, they are also spiritually less connected. Through the arts -- through the story of the captain whose boat honors the Kwakiutl "Wild Woman of the Woods" or the fisherman who sacrifices his catch to save two whales -- people fall again "into harmony with place and each other"; they write the sacred into the real.

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.