National Poetry Month

Finalist for the 2021 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry "The thin knife that severed your tumor," writes Brooke Matson in these poems, "it cleaves me still." What to do when a world is split--terribly, wholly--by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time? Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries--between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge, "now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a robe," only to find it has continued "full and flourishing and larger than before." Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence--selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize--creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.

Book of Beginnings and Ends focuses on the continuing dance between initial and terminal experiences, effects, and conditions. The poems in the book's four sections come in a wide variety of tones and emotional postures, from hilarity to deep grief, in their quest for balance, some means of containing and celebrating both extremes. The poems propose, in fact, that, along with a persistent kindness, achieving and celebrating such balance is life's essential work. This new volume takes on its subject matter with the  lyric imagination, tenderness, clarity and force readers of Howell's writing have come to expect.

In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moon is a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.

A lyrical exploration of the dysphoria of our current social reality, A Drunken Man on a Bicycle focuses on the intersection between personal and communal experience as authoritarian national leadership overwhelms the individual consciousness. These poems capture the atmosphere of the absurd and the horrific, the preposterous and the historic, and dramatize how our interior life shifts between cartoon and film, dream and tragedy, anxiety and the actual policies enacted in the shared world. They give voice to the paradoxical unity of the mad and the elegiac and enact our collective entry into the banality of a drunk on a bicycle as he pursues understanding at this perilous moment in the history of civilization.

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY "Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."--Judges Citation Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

With a startling mix of humor and conviction, RAM HANDS unveils the anxieties of ecological desperation and parenting in the Anthropocene. These poems are an epoch photobombing a selfie, a whale stuffed in a plastic bag, a mouth that tastes of gasoline, a call to arms against arms, and a multifarious assemblage of comedy, animality, and profound human sadness. RAM HANDS reflects on the stench of human complicity; it asks us, yes, we can evolve, but to what end? The speakers in Ellen Welcker's poems ache to become better citizens of the world, and in this aching we, too, lament and hope.

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.

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.

Selected as one of Oprah Winfrey's "Books That Help Me Through" United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize-winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.

A 2022 Washington State Book Award finalist Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod--selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize--is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction. Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light--but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, "the bloody hand holding back / the skin," revealing "the world's inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth." These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.

Conversational, irreverent, and disarmingly honest, the poems of But She Is Also Jane follow the everyday contours of women's lives and the expectations they grapple with. As our speaker approaches middle age, she copes with the loss of loved ones, the realities of an emptying nest, the routine indignities of sexism, and nostalgia for the past. Laura Read's third poetry collection balances discussions of Degas, Vermeer, and Marie Curie with reflections on Sammy Hagar, a troubling outing to a male revue, and memories of watching Mork and Mindy on the night of her mother's hysterectomy.

A starred review in Publishers Weekly called Lucia Perillo's new book a "marvelous collection." "Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake."--Booklist
Lucia Perillo graduated 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.

"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."

Winner, Donald Hall Prize for Poetry Finalist, 2023 NBCC Award for Poetry Winner, 2023 Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award Finalist, 2023 Washington State Book Award in Poetry The poems in Paul Hlava Ceballos's debut collection banana [ ] reveal the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and personal memories. At the heart of the book is a long poem that traces the history of bananas in Latin America using only found text from sources such as history books, declassified CIA documents, and commercials. The book includes collage, Ecuadorian decimas, a sonnet series in the voices of Incan royalty at the moment of colonization, and a long poem interspersed with photos and the author's mother's bilingual idioms. Traversing language and borders, history and story, traditional and invented forms, this book guides us beyond survival to love.

We Had Our Reasons is a collection of poems created by Ricardo Ruiz in collaboration with other members of his Mexican farm community in Eastern Washington. The poems, vivid and pointed, guide the reader through the thoughts and struggles that come with the decision to leave one's home in Mexico, and travel to this remote, rural community of the United States. Through the book access is provided to readers; stories that have gone untold for generations are now shared, evoking conversation at home and within the community due to the commonality of experiences. A glimpse into the multi-generational effects of migration is seen through the recounting of the stories of both parents and their children - both documented and undocumented. Ricardo's raw and unapologetic style cuts right into the emotions of each moment divulged in short, punching, powerful pieces. Biographies and transcripts follow the poems, showcasing the origins of the stories and the people in the book. The book, from Pulley Press, is created with a documentary method, a poetry "pulley." A pulley can assist in shifting and moving objects. It allows a clothesline to spin across its wheel and shuttle clothes into the sun. A "poetry pulley" is the mechanism that a publisher might use to reel in the poems made by rural poets with their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family, and then glide these poems into the hands of readers.

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.

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. Asian & Asian American Studies. Winner of the 2021 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. In MORE AMERICAN, poet Sharon Hashimoto reconstructs a collective memory, conjuring the voices of grandparents, children, soldiers, and "those left to tell." In moving detail, these poems convey the realities of assimilation, service, and internment as experienced by Japanese Americans during, and in the decades following, the Second World War. In this stunning second collection, Hashimoto reckons with the limitations of language, and by extension, notions of citizenship. She deftly sounds the dissonances in the language of loyalty and allegiance.

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.

With an unwavering ascendancy of the austere, Thom Caraway's What the Sky Lacks explores the negative capability of uncertainties and mysteries in a landscape of ruthless severity and elusive beauty, "a world built of unknown language." While witnessing the stark refuge of cottonwood shelterbelts on a field's ragged periphery, listening to the tender weight of empty freight cars rolling through the night, or recounting the dream of a wrecker wherein human warmth exists only in the transient sounds of strangers, a soul transforms into "an instrument of pure light, a circular machine of illumination." The spiritual discipline of recognizing beauty in a world of desolation emerges sheer, unadorned as the rugged territories in the northern badlands obliterated by merciless blizzards, unburnished yet dazzlingly beatific in wintry ruminations of a faith weathered out of wreckage. Instead of hungering for uneasy solace, this enduring poet vows, "We'll rename the world." (Karen An-hwei Lee)

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.

A collection of interviews with American poets by Tod Marshall.

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.