Arizona Poets is a series featuring 20 poets from Arizona in honor of our 60th Anniversary. These poets have all visited the Poetry Center and recordings of those visits are available in our audiovisual archive, Voca. Click here to learn more about our anniversary and here to see the rest of this series. 

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of five books of poetry and five books of nonfiction, including the Guggenheim Fellowship-supported A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress, forthcoming in 2021. Deming is a Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona and a former director of the Poetry Center.

See more of Deming's work on Voca.

Thank you for leaving the desk and the chair,

the books, snapshots and piano.

From Genius Loci. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., ©2005. Read the full poem here.