GENIUS LOCI
New York: Penguin, 2005
ISBN 0-14-303520-7 (paper)

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.

THE COLORS OF NATURE: Culture, Identity and the Natural World
edited with Lauret E. Savoy
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2002
ISBN 1-57131-267-6 (paper)

The introduction and 17 essays in The Colors of Nature movingly address the question, "What is the earth to people of color?" Exploring history, displacement, return, and relationship to place, these writers show that the ways Americans have impacted nature are inseparable from racism and inequities in economic and political power. Featured contributors include Jamaica Kincaid, bell hooks, Francisco X. Alarcon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Diane Glancy, and others.

WRITING THE SACRED INTO THE REAL
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2001
ISBN 157131248X (cloth); ISBN 9990456682 (paper)

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.

THE EDGES OF THE CIVLIZED WORLD: A Journey in Nature and Culture
New York: Picador USA, 1998
ISBN 0-312-19543-5 (cloth and paper)

Searching for answers to a "constellation of questions" about civilization and its assumptions, and for hope for the future of humanity, Alison Hawthorne Deming travels the world. Deming's work is an eloquent narrative that follows her ventures along the fringes of the wild, the uneasy boundary between civilization and its press into farther and farther grounds, "a fault line," she writes, "where pressure constantly builds, where the impingement of economic necessity abrades against nature."

THE MONARCHS: A Poem Sequence
Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997
ISBN 0-8071-2230-0 (cloth); ISBN 0-8071-2231-9 (paper)

The Monarchs is a contemplative study of the human race and the natural world of which it is both apart and separate. Through thought provoking insights and colorful imagery, readers of this volume will agree that Deming has met her own challenge to "make a thing out of this chaos, a thing / that will last."

POETRY OF THE AMERICAN WEST: A Columbia Anthology
editor, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996; paper; 1999 (cloth)
ISBN 0-231-10386-7

Including over 150 poems and illustrated with 40 vivid photographs of the western landscape, Poetry Of The American West chronicles the imagery of the American West over the course of its long and varied cultural heritage. Poetry Of The American West is the first to offer an inclusive collage of voices from a land where cultural collision is part of the rugged landscape.

TEMPORARY HOMELANDS: Essays on Nature, Spirit and Place
New York: St. Martin’s/ Picador USA, 1996
ISBN 0-312-14428-8 (paper)
San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994
ISBN 1-56279-062-5 (cloth)

These essays by an award-winning poet combine the objectivity of a field notebook with the subjectivity of personal memoir. Tracing the subtle connections and tensions between wilderness and human culture, Deming delves deeply into the nature of our need for a sense of place within the natural world.

SCIENCE AND OTHER POEMS
Winner of the 1993 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets
Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1994
ISBN 0-8071-1914-8 (cloth); ISBN 0-8071-1915-6 (paper)

Deming's work is deeply based in her New England life and landscape with its omnipresent ocean, beaching whales, and dense history. But it transcends regionalism in its political awareness. Deming has an unusual ability to spin autobiography together with its social context to create strong, moving poems.