National Poetry Month - April 2023

1985 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "For nearly 25 years Carolyn Kizer has been writing poetry that is imaginative, moving and funny...she is still at the top of her powers. This is a wonderful book."--Washington Post Book World

In The Clouds of Lucca, encounters with diverse cultures and the unknown lay bare the tension and beauty of human experience by mapping out the range of feeling and understanding of which we are capable. Driven by lyrical voice and attention to the kaleidoscopic particulars, these poems trace the imagination?s imprinting of meaning on the given world. This book explores the interplay of mind and world, of self and society, and of past and present through the lenses of travel, cultural artifact, and the crises forged by our achievement of understanding and our persistent blindness. The Clouds of Lucca crafts an appreciation for the beauty of culture?s broken wonders within an awareness that it is futile to resist change within the weather of time.

""The Radium Watch Dial Painters" is a book of sheer power and range, poems that burn in brilliant flashes and with searing luminescence. There are great stories in here, flurries of fresh images and graceful turns of music and wit. Above all, you find Dan Butterworth's pitch-perfect gift for language, his acrobatic intelligence, his fierce decency. I loved this book." -Jess Walter, author of "The Zero" and "Citizen Vince"D.S. Butterworth teaches literature and creative writing at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He is the author of "Waiting for Rain: A Farmer's Story."

Scintillating new work from a celebrated contemporary poet. Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2004) Runner-up for the ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award (2003) Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions?those of love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable. The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the ever-unfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her "Fido, Jolted by Jove" reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: "the world itself is worried." Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: "a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it." This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity.

Railtown Almanac is an anthology of poems by Spokane residents and poems about Spokane. The anthology celebrates the wide diversity of talented poets in the greater Spokane area.

Haiku in English is an anthology of more than 800 brilliantly chosen poems that were originally written in English by over 200 poets from around the world. Although haiku originated as a Japanese art form, it has found a welcome home in the English-speaking world. This collection tells the story for the first time of Anglophone haiku, charting its evolution over the last hundred years and placing it within its historical and literary context.

Jonathan Johnson is a poet unafraid to seek wisdom, even as the bewilderment of longing floods like shadows--or perhaps light--into every day. We are alive now, these poems remind us. In response to that beautiful and difficult truth, Johnson offers the sincerity of his fullest attentions and speaks in a voice as fluent in the intricacies of consciousness as it is in the tender directness of elegy. In this new collection, imagination is a migratory instinct that leads across a vast home range of shorelines, northern forests and companionable sidewalks. Traveling these rich physical territories and correspondent territories of the human heart with Johnson, the reader finds ample reason for gratitude and the grace to inhabit the moment as it passes away.

"Build me a house of words,/ A house of how and why,/ and I will live in it with you/ Under the silent sky,/ For we will tell each other/ Things we would deny/ And believe them by and by." Jonathan Potter's House of Words is a collection of poems arranged in four movements echoing the structure of an Elizabethan sonnet. Each poem here represents a single stressed syllable pursed between lips, cobbling pillar and post, rafter and roof, where stars are nails and the night is a hammer falling. The book opens in wonder, dwelling in a world in which words and the gestures of language provide access to the freshness deep down things. But even in that initial movement, a gap is evident which grows as it confronts contradiction and death. Subdued recedings of resignation follow, tentatively emerging into the light of faith.House of Words is the inaugural publication of Korrektiv Press.

MacArthur Genius Award winner Lucia Perillo is a fearless poet who, with characteristic humor and incisive irony, confronts the failings and wonder of nature, particularly the frail and resilient human body. This generous collection draws upon five previous volumes, including books selected as aNew York Times"100 Notable Books of the Year" and as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From "Again, the Body": When you spend many hours alone in a room you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself-- this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it, from scratching off the juicy scab'... Lucia Perillograduated from McGill University in Montreal with a major in wildlife management, and subsequently worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and has published eight books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She was a MacArthur Fellow and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

"Inseminating the Elephant [is] a collection of poems, often laced with humor, that examines popular culture, the limits of the human body, and the tragicomic aspects of everyday experience."--Pulitzer Prize finalist citation "These poems are tough and witty."--The New Yorker "Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo."--Time Out New York A 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist,Inseminating the Elephant delivers hard-edged yet vulnerable poems that reconcile the comic impulse with the complications and tragedies of living in the eating and breathing body--what Lucia Perillo calls the "meat cage." Perillo dissects human failings and sexuality, as well as collisions between nature and the manufactured world, to create an unforgettable poetic vision. How the zoologists start is by facing the mirror of her flanks, that foreboding luscious place where the gray hide gives way to a zeroing-in of skin as vulnerable as an orchid. Which is the place to enter, provided you are brave, brave enough to insert your laser-guided camera to avoid the two false openings of her "vestibule," much like the way of entering death, of giving birth to death, calling it forth as described in the Tibetan Book. Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal and worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and has published five books of poetry. She was a MacArthur Fellow in 2000 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

"Maya Zeller's American Northwest is a land of verdant sensuality, insistent yet fragile and intimate as it was in the eyes of Roethke, storied in mossy and weathered details, human ruin and hard won grace as it was in the heart of Kesey. With extraordinary veracity and empathy she inhabits the body and emerging consciousness of a girl and young woman alive to the lives around her. There are poetry books with the power to move poets, fewer poetry books with the power to move lovers of literature, and those rare poetry books with the power to move just about anyone else. Rust Fish is all three."

Nominated for a National Book Award, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir contains many of Hugo's most loved and anthologized poems. The collection includes "Montgomery Hollow," the title poem, and the famous, "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," in which he turns to the reader, midway through his description of a dying town, and says, "Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss/ still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat/ so accurate, the church bell simply seems/ a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?" -- Academy of American Poets

The result easily demonstrated, then as now, the massive achievement of the writer whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living."

Lives of the Animals takes us to that place where the boundaries between predator and prey, the observer and the observed, merge, reverse, become re-imagined. We find ourselves inside a story of death and life, witness to acts of survival so primal they seem less instinctive than passionate. And it is passion that most informs these poems: the bond between lovers, between parent and child, between humans and other animals, both wild and domestic, that populate our shared world of hunger and need.

Here is an account of life on an island, close to the earth and sea the things and creatures of a specific place, with the soul and sense of a remarkably gifted poet enriching every line, every page.

Grounded in the physical while asking metaphysical questions, the poems in Sweetclover detail love, wilderness, fracture, and fusion. They speak of wildflowers, the slant of a collarbone, the flight feathers of predatory birds, and the eye of winter. American Book Award?winner Shann Ray?s affinity for Montana landscapes and the intimate heart of the beloved challenges the age of enragement with delight in those we are graced to know.

Shann Ray brings to American poetry a voice that is at once rugged and unapologetically vulnerable. In these poems, Ray writes with the same incisive eye that has won him so much praise for his fiction, but with an even sharper ear. Like any decent bluesman, Shann knows when to wail, when to whisper, and when to let the silences do their own damn work. Here, folks, is an able and true Ôvessel for the song of this world.Õ

In this rich, shadowy, glittering anthology edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller , a multitude of Northwest writers share their singular stories, essays, and poems that center what Shields calls "the literature of despair." These pages confront what is difficult in life with extraordinary precision and grace: In Beth Piatote's story "Secondary Infection," a Yakama auntie narrates the undoing of a lonely woman; in the essay "There Is No Story Until It Happens to You," Richard Fifield writes about a devastating car crash in the remote Montana northlands of his youth; in his series of poems, "During the Pandemic," Rick Barot reflects on fear, isolation, and hope as quarantine descends; in her visual poem, "The Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit: An Auto-Elegy," artist Mita Mahato mourns the decline of a fragile species and the terrors of human impact on the environment. In works that span themes from colonialism to environmentalism, from divorce to disease, from toxic masculinity to a loss of faith, the writers here unflinchingly address what makes us vulnerable, what makes us complex, what cleaves us and what connects us. As Zeller writes in the book's introduction, this ambitious anthology pushes us to "learn, memorize, and recite the songs sung by these regional voices, mapping us into a communal root system of evergreen selves."

Poetry. Fiction. Native American Studies. In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time."

Tess Gallagher, one of America's most accomplished poets, presents Moon Crossing Bridge, her sixth book, a descent into the world of the dead, a remembrance of her recently deceased beloved, whose presence and absence are recalled in sombre lyrical rhythms and with a extraordinary range of expressions of love and sadness. Devoid of self-pity or illusion, yet full of dream and vision and wisdom, these beautifully intense and powerful poems bestow the gift of words to the widow's silence, to the silence of all who are muted by grief and loss. With this unusual volume, arranged in six carefully paced movements to suggest the journey from death to recovery, Gallagher charges language with its utmost responsibilities: here poetry aspires deeply and urgently beyond its cultural marginality to embrace the paradox of sharing unshareable pain and to assume again an Orphic voice and a communal necessity.

Poems consider women's roles in society, childhood, home, nature, language, communications, the past, and mortality.

This paperback edition contains the complete text of Roethke's seven published volumes in addition to sixteen previously uncollected poems. Included are his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners The Walking, Words for the Wind, and The Far Field. These two hundred poems demonstrate the variety of Roethke's themes and styles, the comic and serious sides of his temperament, and his breakthroughs in the use of language. Together they document the development of an extraordinary creative source of American poetry.

Poetry. "100,000 drones above us, a headline said. / Someone must love us, must be eager to know us," Tod Marshall writes in the title poem of his third collection, BUGLE. Notes of (self) surveillance blast throughout this book, which shakes its readers awake to encounter the slagheap of extraction (mineral and confessional), the dark corners of containment (domestic and poetic), and the possibilities (sometimes hopeful, often grim) of transformation.

Designed to accompany Range of the Possible, Tod Marshall's landmark anthology of interviews with contemporary poets, A Range of Voices offers five poems by each of the twenty poets included in the original volume. The first major anthology of America's leading mid-career poets - those born between 1941 and 1959 - this collection is the applied side of the current discussion of contemporary poetry and poetics, while also providing a brilliant buffet of tones, tropes, styles, structures, and themes. All libraries and all students, teachers, readers, and writers of poetry, and everyone with an interest in contemporary culture, will want a copy of this sparkling new collection. Among the twenty poets included are Linda Bierds, Gillian Conoley, Robert Hass, Edward Hirsch, Christopher Howell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, Li-Young Lee, Lucia Perillo, David St. John, Dave Smith, and Robert Wrigley.

"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr's a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." --Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, Orr's Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

Jay Parini knows that poetry doesn't matter to most people. But he also recognizes this as a serious problem, which he tackles in this focused and passionate book about the nature of poetry and its uses in the world. A primer for the general reader, students, and novices and experts alike, this is a candid and personal plea for the relevance of an art form that lies at the center of Western culture--an art form we need now more than ever.

Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition.? Poets and those who simply want to understand poetry will enjoy this study of poetry as a conscious craft.? Breaking down the basics with examples from well-known poems, Oliver shows how the dimensions of sound and rhythm (musicality) and lyrical words (assonance, alliteration, etc.) can combine to make powerful verse. She enables readers to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas."

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty--and sheer variety--leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia Rankine's Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell. The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Glück, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are not--or not yet--well known. The Poem Is You will appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it. —Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled Stephen Fry believes that if one can speak and read English, one can write poetry. Many of us have never been taught to read or write poetry and think of it as a mysterious and intimidating form. Or, if we have been taught, we remember uncomfortable silence when an English teacher invited the class to "respond" to a poem. In The Ode Less Travelled, Fry sets out to correct this problem by giving aspiring poets the tools and confidence they need to write poetry for pleasure.Fry is a wonderfully engaging teacher and writer of poetry himself, and he explains the various elements of poetry in simple terms, without condescension. His enjoyable exercises and witty insights introduce the concepts of Metre, Rhyme, Form, Diction, and Poetics. Aspiring poets will learn to write a sonnet, on ode, a villanelle, a ballad, and a haiku, among others. Along the way, he introduces us to poets we've heard of, but never read. The Ode Less Travelledis a lively celebration of poetry that makes even the most reluctant reader want to pick up a pencil and give it a try.

A collection of interviews with American poets by Tod Marshall.

Stafford's advice to beginning poets has become a favorite text in writing programs