I think of my friend tonight, where she stops
near Denver or Laramie, looking up to bless the stars
as she would bless the superfluous, indestructible
objects by which the future will judge us—
plastic Jesuses and aluminum candle snuffers
and laminated newspapers cut-outs announcing the births
and the deaths and marriages to which we have been unfaithful,
and to which we have been faithful, also,
like gravity, like a handful of truths
that, once they take hold, never let go again,
and return with us to the earth, as if the earth were elseshere.
—from “The New World” in Vesper Sparrows

Poet and memoirist Deborah Digges died on April 10 near Amherst, Massachusetts, the New York Times reports. The author of four poetry collections and two memoirs, Digges was a professor of English at Tufts University, where she taught since 1986. She was born Deborah Leah Sugarbaker on February 6, 1950 in Jefferson City, Missouri. She studied art at the University of Missouri. After marrying at nineteen and settling in California, Digges began writing poetry and then returned to school to earn an English degree from the University of California, Riverside. In 1982 she attended the University of Missouri, completing a Master’s in English, and, in 1984, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Digges’s debut poetry collection, Vesper Sparrows, was published in 1986. Other collections include Late in the Millennium, Rough Music, and Trapeze. Digges wrote two memoirs, Fugitive Spring, an account of her coming of age, and The Stardust Lounge: Stories From a Boy’s Adolescence, about her youngest son, Stephen.