This year’s Mayor’s Book Club features two books that explore our place in the natural world.
“We Loved It All” is a personal memoir by New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lydia Millet who shares a poetic and informed assessment of nature’s inspiration and how we may enhance our relationship with the natural world.
“You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, features 50 new poems by some of the country’s most accomplished poets that reflect upon our essential connection with the natural world. The anthology includes Austin poets Carrie Fountain, Cecily Park and Roger Reeves.
The Mayor’s Book Club is an initiative of The Library Foundation in partnership with the Mayor’s Office and the Austin Public Library to encourage a community experience through reading. This year’s program is supported in part by Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Programs
Lydia Millet in conversation with ocean scientist Juli Berwald
Wednesday, April 30 | 7 p.m.
Austin Central Library, 710 West Cesar Chavez St.
The event is free; reservations are recommended
Reserve tickets at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1262837052619
Reading and Conversation with Carrie Fountain and Cecily Parks, Austin poets featured in “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World”
Wednesday, May 14 | 7 p.m.
Austin Central Library, 710 West Cesar Chavez St.
The event is free; reservations are recommended
Reserve tickets at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1262952628309
About “We Loved It All”
Lydia Millet’s anti-memoir explores the pain and joy of being a parent, child, and human at a moment when the richness of the planet’s life is deeply threatened.
Emerging from Millet’s quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy, “We Loved it All” marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others” — the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with exquisite accounts of nonhumans and arresting meditations on the power of story to shape the future.
“We Loved It All” addresses with reverence the most urgent crises of our day. The fear and grief of extinction and climate change, Millet suggests, are forms of love that might be turned to resistance.
About Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel “A Children’s Bible” was a New York Times Best 10 Books of 2020 selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection “Fight No More” received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection “Love in Infant Monkeys” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family
About “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World”
Edited and introduced by Ada Limón, the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, “You Are Here” features 50 previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape — be it the breath-taking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop — offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.
Said Limón: “With poems written for vast and inspiring vistas to poems acknowledging the green spaces that flourish even in the most urban of settings, this anthology hopes to reimagine what ‘nature poetry’ is during this urgent moment on our planet.”
