For the first official day of autumn, Poetry Center staff was excited to provide their fall reading recommendations, which appear below.

 

Laura Caywood, Administrative Assistant

House of Rain by Craig Childs

House of Rain  reminds me of Fall because of the incredible sense of place that I feel in his descriptions of Southwest locales/Native sacred places. Fall is my favorite time of year because of the sense of drama that the change of light creates as it refreshes the senses, promising cooler temps and crispness of air that makes me giddy. This book is largely about place, light/lighting, movement (in every sense), and the sacred.

 

 

 

 

Julie Johnson, Senior Library Assistant

Pinion: An Elegy by Claudia Emerson

In the desert, fall comes slowly: the angle of light grows less harsh, the nights lengthen and turn cooler, and plants go dormant as they wait out the dryness between the monsoons and the little winter rains. Although not about the desert, Claudia Emerson’s Pinion feels like a fitting choice for this time of year because of the way it strikingly enacts the measured, settling change that means autumn here. “Morning glory vines writhed over the threshold, / bearing flowers that pulsed slow and slow, opened / and closed to bruised scrolls,” she writes in “Homecoming.” In the course of Pinion’s thirty-six poems, we witness the dismantling of a family and their small southern farm, but we do so only in fragments, in crystallized shards of a conversation between two voices—Preacher and Sister—that never quite come into sync with one another. Welcome the “slow and slow” unfolding of our autumn with Pinion’s record of a place’s ending.

 

 

 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan, K-12 Education Assistant

Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

When I first moved to Tucson and took a poetry craft class with Jane Miller, I remember spending those fall Saturdays (I think it was fall) luxuriating in the entirety of the book we were working with the following week on my orange futon. This was the first time I encountered Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.

 

 

 

 

Sarah Gzemski, Publicity and Publications Coordinator

Culture of One by Alice Notley 

Summer seems to be a time of great community and many voices, and Culture of One helps me carry that feeling into autumn. I read it initially for my very first MFA class, and the relationships built there (with writers, with reading, with mentors, with friends) are attached both to the book and the season. Notley has been as comforting as she has been instructive, and I return to this book with great joy each time.