Saguaro: Alison Deming

If it takes you a hundred years
to grow your first arm
for how long
do you feel the sensation
of craving something new?

Of Interest

Deming is a prior director of the Poetry Center. She is currently a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona, where she holds the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice. We are hoping this installation will encourage others to ask their own questions of a saguaro. The poem is included in The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. Deming is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.