DeLana Dameron poetry book launch

In her new book of poetry, “How God Ends Us,” Columbia native DéLana R. A. Dameron explores timeless spiritual questions that ultimately have no answers. But along the way she finds anger, grief, joy – and, finally, the consolation and resolution that poetry can bring.

“How God Ends Us.” the fourth winner of the S.C. Poetry Initiative’s annual South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, was published this spring by the USC Press. Celebrate its launch with Dameron from 6:30-8 p.m. Aug. 28 at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. This will be a homecoming for the 24-year-old poet, who lives in New York City and is spending most of August in residency at The Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in rural New York State.

Pulitzer Prize finalist - and Obama inauguration poet - Elizabeth Alexander writes in the book’s forward that the speakers in Dameron’s poetry “are ruthless with the poem-making self but filled with compassion for the world they encounter.”

National Book Award finalist Carl Phillips says these poems are “rich with the arresting image, ever graceful … (and) argue for witness as the only way of knowing — of being somehow grateful for — a world that is always leaving us, even as we ourselves must leave it.”

Learn more about Dameron and her work at www.delanadameron.comand on her blog, www.loneriverwalk.blogspot.com. And see a complete schedule of S.C. Poetry Initiative events — including the 2009 Poet’s Summit on Sept. 19 — at www.sc.edu/poetry/.