Pacific Northwest Poetry Series
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The Grief of a Happy Life
In Christopher Howell’s twelfth collection of poems, his gifts for elegy, humor, and lyricism are on full display. The Grief of a Happy Life explores the interplay between memory and imagination, celebrating the ways that happiness and grief inform one another and give our lives fullness and vitality.Arranged in four sections, Howell’s poems feature not only these concerns, but a large and various cast of characters as well. Aeneas, Saint Theresa, Ovid, Kierkegaard, a German submarine, and so much more are woven together with Howell’s trademark precision and accessibility into exquisite tableaux, each providing a view of both what we must live with and what we must not live without.
Republic Café
Inspired by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour , and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer’s Baltics and Yehuda Amichai’s Time , Republic Café is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment. Mindful of epigenetic experience as our bodies become living vessels for history’s tragedies, David Biespiel praises not only the essentialness of our human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting.A single sequence, arranged in fifty-four numbered sections, Republic Café details the experience of lovers in Portland, Oregon, on the eve and days following September 11, 2001. To touch a loved one’s bare skin, even in the midst of great tragedy, is simultaneously an act of remembering and forgetting. This is a tale of love and darkness, a magical portrait of the writer as a moral and imaginative participant in the political life of his nation.
Vagrants & Accidentals
Vagrants & Accidentals, the second full-length collection from poet Kevin Craft, is part vade mecum, part songbook, whose taut lines and adaptable stanzas traffic in the personal effects of emigration and estrangement, exile and return. In ornithology, a vagrant or accidental is a bird that appears out of its natural or normal range, blown off course by a storm, or inadvertently introduced into a new environment by human trade. Likewise, Craft is interested in things taken out of context–Greek myths in the Pacific Northwest, the potsherd or megalith stranded in a museum, excess carbon in the atmosphere, American pop songs in a Roman piazza, adoptions, estrangements, dangerous migrations, the constant shuffle of human beings from place to place�asking how we reorient ourselves in the crossfire of constant, rapid, global transformation.Organized into four parts, the collection moves from the deeply personal to more global issues of interconnectedness. In language intensely lyrical, grounded in prehistory and science, Craft evokes questions of family and belonging that underscore a lifetime, gradually revealing the forces that shape us from the deepest reaches of time and place. As some birds sing to define their territory, so his poetry calls between the raggedness of daily life and our deeper yearning for coherence.
The Holding Hours
Emotion, raw and unadorned, is woven through the poems of Christianne Balk's The Holding Hours. Part I explores the subtle and surprising transformations that come from caring for her young, neurologically injured daughter. Insights unfold in metaphor and persona below the surface of an exquisitely observed life.Gazing through the lens of other lives challenged by disability and illness, including those of John Muir and the 16th-century Saint Germaine Cousin, these poems place personal experience in the context of pastoral poetic traditions, disability studies, and the history of political disruption. Balk anchors these meditations within the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. She examines her (and our) relationship with nature�the moon snail, the azalea, snow geese, the dog rose�sing the precise and unsentimental language of a trained naturalist. The sounds and images evoked reveal a stunning artistry�a mediation between self and the world and a celebration of the beauty and fragility of life and the anticipation of rebirth.
Disquiet
Disquiet is a collection of poems that utilizes natural phenomena�a bright beach, a fallen tree limb, the weight of gravity�to evoke and reflect upon memory and human experience. The poems are structurally innovative, each shaped around a central axis as they trace the speaker�s growth from childhood to adulthood. Acute observations resonate throughout the book as its focus shifts from the natural world to the world of the made�the grocery cart or pie-case or microscope�to the world of visual art, and then back. The poems are subtly braided together in a way reminiscent of the invisible bonds that unite snowflakes or cells.
Charming Gardeners
The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel�s new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America.Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California.These poems explore the �insistent murmurs� of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America�s wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy. We are offered poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals � all in a masterful idiom Robert Pinsky has called Biespiel�s �own original grand style.�I should stop back thereAnd stand on both feet in the grazing sunlightAnd hear this chorus of America singing.But I am so afraid of the testament of the delivered.from �TO __________ FROM THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN WILLIAMSON, WEST VIRGINIA
Plume
The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the «empty» desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where «every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb,» and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: «blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out.» Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: «one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?»The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of «Atomic City,» Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM
Underdog
In Underdog , poet Katrina Roberts draws on wide-ranging historical and cultural sources to consider questions of identity, to ask us to meditate on how each of us is “other” – native, immigrant, sojourner, alien – and to examine our at-once shared and foreign frontiers and margins. Throughout the book, the writer’s “home” becomes a palimpsest of characters erased and resurrected. In boldly inventive poems, she addresses the lives of Chinese immigrants, the appeal of African Dogon tribal lore, the heroics and defeats of artists, canine astronauts, and Mexican farm laborers, to name just a few.Dramatic and lyrical, many poems become repositories for spells, memories, and tales. Here landscapes are faces to be studied and memorized; forgotten and overlooked legends and objects (whether quotidian, pop-cultural, ancient, or obscure), as well as characters from this planet and beyond, are retrieved and acknowledged. Other poems are concise prismatic shards, refracting and seeking specific meaning and even beauty in a world that is often both unpredictable and inscrutable. All are stitched together with unflinching compassion and a keen desire to bear witness, to comprehend something of the self’s relevance in a global context.The poems, often meticulously researched, are elaborate matrices of associations, translations, re-imaginings. Age-old mind-body questions emerge: how did we get here, these poems ask urgently, and in what ways will we carry on? What does it mean “to be” and “to belong” in times of crisis? They wonder at how individuals through the ages have handled, often with grace, tremendous injustice, and they seek to comprehend the mysteries of our perpetual migrations away from and toward each other.Their Flight is Practically SilentHe says one thing meaningits opposite. Before water starts to run,an ache in the jaw leaves mespeechless. A packet of photos: each face has beencut out. This one: me, a child holding a waferof sky – a robin’s egg. They used to say you haveher eyes. Another: wrists slashedby light, lifted to offer the world a melon, caught uphair in a twist off the shoulders, the neck,my neck – impossible and elegant – a swan’s.Such grace shocks me. Who is this? That nightbefore the baby died: barn owls calling acrossthe creek. Did he say: Hear them? Neverto be born at all; some peoplewould say not even a baby, not “viable.”A small sound – sizzle of baconcurling on a flat black pan, unseen. His armsre-crossed. And this vesselmade of ash, this monument risingfrom dust? I didn’t want any of it and I said so.
No Starling
The new century peeled me bone bare like a songinside a warbler – that bird, people,who knows not to go where the sky'sstopped.Over the years, Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sureand startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling , Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly peopled with figures from this and parallel worlds – Simone Weil, Verlaine, Nabokov, Eurydice, «the new boys» working in the morgue, and others – No Starling moves beyond a reliance on the dramatic resonance of individual characters. Its vision is deeper, its focus both singular and communal: the self on its journey through the world («Mouth, mouth: my light / and my exit. Let nothing / block the route»), and our responsibilities as a people for the precarious state of that world.SlateMy too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in backsluice right. I was driving with the dead Nancein the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't workso there was an added worry of runningout of juice. Her word. Her word onewindy evening with the carpetsstripped from a floor, whichsurprised us as stone – slatefrom the quarry we wereheaded to now, but Let's first have ussome juice, she'd said, then, barefoot on bare slate.The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet,thuds left, clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving,sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottledon my windshield. Thank God, here's the quarry,and there's the high ledge, where, as a girl longago, she'd stepped bravely from the whitetowel and stared down. Then she'd held her noseand leapt out into it – this same cool and radiant air.