Speedway & Swan is back! Susan Briante hosts Alison Hawthorne Deming in the KXCI studio for an exciting new episode. 

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s collection of poems "Stairway to Heaven” was published earlier this year from Peguin edition). She is also the author of four nonfiction books, most recently "Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit" and four additional poetry books.  A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Deming is an Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona where she is a Professor of Creative Writing and Affiliated Faculty with the Institute of the Environment. 

With musical selections by Rostam, Of Montreal, Odetta and Solange.

 

 

Hsieh Ling-yun “Dwelling in the Mountain” The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yun translated by David Hinton (New Directions)

Anne Carson “God’s Justice” from Glass, Irony and God (New Directions)

Ronald Johnson “Beam 12” from Ark (Flood Editions)

Wislawa Szymborska “Maybe All This” translated, from the Polish, by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, from Map: Collected and Last Poems (Mariner Books)

Ross Gay “A Small Needful Fact” from Split This Rock

Layli Long Soldier from “Whereas” from the book Whereas (Graywolf)

Debra Marquart “Lament” from Small Buried Things (New Rivers Press)

Camille Dungy “Characteristics of Life” from Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan Univ Press)

Ilya Kaminsky “We Lived Happily During the War” from the anthology Poems for Political Disaster (Boston Review Press)

Gerald Stern “Roses” from American Sonnets (W.W. Norton)

 

SPEEDWAY & SWAN is a fortnightly, one-hour free-format radio program that presents contemporary poetry against a context of variously compatible and offbeat musical selections.  Culling from the exceptional libraries of his partners, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and KXCI 91.3 Tucson Community Radio, creator and host Brian Blanchfield is joined in conversation each episode by a rotating guest co-host who brings to the hour a selection of poetry from his or her personal canon, which, along with the freshest and best from the "new shelves," they read live. 

Most episodes also feature a recorded performance from Voca, the Poetry Center's audio archive of its legendary poetry readings since 1963. SPEEDWAY & SWAN represents a partnership between the Poetry Center, which archives the show in listenable format with an annotated playlist, and KXCI, where the show streams live.   

Since 1983, KXCI 91.3 FM has been committed to connecting Tucson and Southern Arizona to one another and to the world with informative, engaging, and creative community-based radio programming.

Susan Briante’s most recent book The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. The Kenyon Review calls it “masterful at every turn.” She is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011), both from Ahsahta Press. Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Arizona.