National Poetry Month - April 2023

Poetry. Regional, humorous, and wise, the poems in Aileen Keown Vaux's CONSOLATION PRIZE bloom from Central Washington State Fair themes. "Find Your Happy!" transforms into a meditation on joy's ephemerality; "Celebrate What's Great!" examines both the wonder and despair of our faculties of observation. The first chapbook published in Scablands Books's Channeled Chapbook series, CONSOLATION PRIZE promises to be a quintessential Inland Northwest read, as quirky and bright as the Yakima fair that frames it.

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.

In her poem "Neanderthal," Cathy Bobb describes how "with objective tenderness" science uncovers from a grave the evidence of "a brutish existence," but later in the lab finds "pollen from hundreds of flowers," covering the body. With such "objective tenderness" is exactly how the poet proceeds in this remarkable book as the facts of her daughter's murder and a family's struggles with mental illness are laid before us in unadorned language as gentle as petals. - Bruce Guernsey, former Editor of The Poon River Poetry Review and author of From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010

"Christopher Howell's poems rely on a redeeming darkness to bring themselves into the world. Through meditative, short lyrics, and an eerily quiet approach, Howell redefines the place of the self in a poem. These deceptively triumphant views of discovery and survival arrive in a place that welcomes us as both witnesses and participants." -"Bloomsbury Review""It is a great pleasure, once again, to listen to the particular play of Christopher Howell s mind, his elegant rhythms and graceful rhetoric; and, beside all that craftsmanship and intelligence, how good to encounter that lovely eye for flesh, for the succulent things of this world." -Patricia Goedicke "Once I began reading "Just Waking," I had to read it straight through, late into the night. I had a growing need to experience the way these poems and their many voices move into the world of things and people and ghosts and ideas, with this speculative intelligence, this tender and sometimes comic discourse that by so loving a sense of what is beautiful in being alive always achieves the condition of music. I just didn t want the book to end." -Bill Tremblay "Deep in this book is an unfolding story of waking. Experience resonates clearly, emotively, paradoxically, and the imagination teaches and redeems through inner dialogue and vision. Read Machado and Lyric with Blue Horses to see how moving and masterful a poet Christopher Howell is. If the poet James Wright were still living, we'd have two poets writing with such imperative, beauty, and depth." -James Grabill

In this extraordinary new collection by distinguished poet Christopher Howell, the opening poem presents us with a spiritual paradox that will echo throughout its pages. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. The poem closes with: And if he remembers now he is in love, which is the soul?s condition, and alone because that is how we live. "How we live" is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, the poems' major achievement. How do we live, in our dailiness, in our loves, our private and global wars? And, in the face of unbearable grief, how can we live? Keats When Keats, at last beyond the curtain of love?s distraction, lay dying in his room on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini Fountain ?filling him like flowers,? he held his breath like a coin, looked out into the moonlight and thought he saw snow. He did not suppose it was fever or the body?s weakness turning the mind. He thought, ?England!? and there he was, secretly, for the rest of his improvidently short life: up to his neck in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries of street venders, perfect and affectionate as his soul. For days the snow and statuary sang him so far beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow of his last words to Severn, ?Don?t be frightened,? may enter you.

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.

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.

If the dead are a sea and the living an island, these poems speak from the shore. Their steady company consoles and reminds us that the wages of mortal awareness and sorrow endured can be attention and generosity. From mournful solitude and wanderings as far as Paris, Greece and Spain, Johnson returns again and again to his familiar Scottish coasts, Highlands, and relations; to fatherhood and romantic love; to sensory wonder and the reverence of moments; and now and then to outright grace.

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into one momentous volume. 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 the massive libraries of oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Dinéh poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. In When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, Harjo offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature.

Poetry. Women's Studies. "To be clear, a gay-owned press that doesn't rabble rouse a bit is no friend of mine, and oh, these poems! From the moment we saw Kate Lebo's prayers, we were smitten and so it is a great honor and privilege to collect them into one reasonably priced, ready to give to the people--'may they find their freedom from Cathy McMorris Rodgers' package--and to get them out into the world! Kate Lebo writes openly and honestly. She sings the songs of liberation! She is the hammer of freedom! She bakes pie like a boss and drinks a bit of whiskey. 'I used myself roughly and I / enjoyed it, // drank milk and whiskey / and assumed these pleasures were normal.' Whether it is health care, marriage, the role of women in politics or society, she reminds us and her representative that decisions in the other Washington have real impact here in our own state, no matter the posturing for power and riches Congresswoman Rodgers seeks on the backs of the hard-working women (and men) of her district. We want you to copy these. We want you to pass them around. We want you to sing them to your neighbors. We want you to VOTE."--Knox Gardner, Publisher of Entre Ríos Books

Poetry. In language poet Laurie Lamon calls "both spare and sumptuous," BOOK OF EXODUS narrates the imagined experiences of a Russian family who lived for 40 years in the Siberian taiga, utterly isolated from society. Kathryn Smith's debut collection examines wilderness, loneliness, and faith in poems that author Nance Van Winckel says "allow entry, or re-entry, to primal selves, we who once roamed a forest, ate of its bounty, and fought its beasts. And yes, in the best sense, the book also seems--as a marvelous abecedarian poem's title proclaims--a 'Rehearsal for the Apocalypse.'"

Winner of the 2018 Open Country Press Chapbook Contest "Chosen Companions of the Goblin is wild work to read, as it swerves from science to spiritualism, cuts across genres, styles, and points of view, darts from a spin through a lyrical meadow, to a roll call of the visible factions of the mid-19th century U.S.A. With a kind of documentary poetics, Kathryn Smith builds this world where new paranormal rites co-occurred with scientific wonders. She conjures her own sly commentary from erasures of contemporary texts, list poems, and other evidentiary methods, offering a coded transmission from the poet amidst its many perceptions. And always she stays close to the girls at the center of it all, Maggie and Kate Fox, spirit mediums, never surrendering their agency to the strange cultural contraptions that caught them up and made magic of their bodies. This book is fun and heartbreaking and vivid, with a flair for the real. At every turn it shares a secret for those keen on knowing." -Megan McShea, author of Steep in the Boil

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.

In Laura Read's second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever been: a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mother--a woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Read's poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing "dresses from the old country."

Laurie Lamon is professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. A widly published poet, she was awarded a Witter Bynner fellowship at the Library of Congress by Poet Laureate Donald Hall.

Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts charts a course into magical waters, anchoring itself in the frightening politicization of a woman's body. The chemistry of this conversation includes pomegranates for human heads, bones that can walk, and a ship sprung from a person's back, "floating farther from shore." The speaker in these incantations, behind these urgent watercolors, muses on the philosophies of geologic time, climate change, human genomes, and existential destruction. This book sets out to discover meaning in this terrible, beautiful time -- and suggests wonder is where we'll find it: "the diagnosis is strong / for the wild & wind mills." Full Color.

Nance Van Winckel's poems hover at the intersections of folktale and history, of past life regressions and future life vision, in a voice that is intimate, eerie, wry, and always strangely like a voice that has been going on in our heads without our noticing. The chill and pleasure it renders is a little like what one feels upon first reading Proust

Poetry. Poems "funny, stark, spot-on and utterly beautiful" comprise her collection, OUR FOREIGNER, "a brilliant and dark comedy." This is Betsy Sholl's apt description for the poetry of Nance Van Winckel, one of the Northwest's foremost poets and writers, and her latest release--from The Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books. Van Winckel's own relatives traveled west enduring the hardship and tests of character that confronted those who made such treks in the 1800's. OUR FOREIGNER explores, among other conditions and anomalies, ideas of journey, progress and regress, travel both physical and psychological. A variety of voices populate this collection, speakers from the past, or bright, sassy, contemporary folks talking as if all they have to do is open their mouths and out flies poetry. They manage, these poems, to be at once plain-speaking and brainy, lucid and deeply mysterious.

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)

A surreal, intelligent and moving collection of poetry from Pacific Northwest author Tim Greenup.

These works, by award winning-writers and poets finding print for the first time, are a testament to our state's bountiful creativity and the ways that Washington's poets transform inspiration into memorable language. And those ways are myriad! Our state has so many poets writing a wide variety of poetries: from long narrative poems and wacky surrealist romps to sprawling-lined diatribes and pithy lyrics that pop! We have stage poets exploring the boundaries of the page, and we have sonneteers stretching the edges of that accentual-syllabic pattern. We also have vibrant slam scenes, wonderful publishers, and many festivals aimed solely at celebrating the power of poetry (in Seattle, Spokane, Tieton, Wenatchee, Ellensburg, Skagit Valley, Bellingham, and many other places). Simply, we have many people invested in exploring and sharing how language matters. This anthology is, I hope, an embodiment of and contribution to that enthusiasm, engagement, and prolific word-energy. In my service at this position, I have heard Washington singing, and that voice is diverse, stirring, and compelling. Herein are some of its songs. - Tod Marshall, Washington State Poet Laureate, 2016-2018

We need reasons to write. Specific, tangible reasons give creativity a chance against a blustering, attention-grabbing world. The Whimsical Muse provides eighty-four concrete reasons to write. Eighty-four exercises that you can begin right now. They require no planning or preparation. Just open the book and go. In under a minute, your creative juices will be flowing. All of the prompts here can be adapted to suit the moment. Each one has two parts: "Quick" and "Lingering." If you are really strapped for time, opt for a "Quick" activity that can be done in a matter of minutes. Don't be surprised if your energy and your spirits lift as you start working. It turns out that getting words on the page ignites our gusto and fearlessness. And I predict it won't take long for you to see your imagination for the remarkable resource it is. Remember: the more you use your imagination, the more imagination you'll have, and the more you'll write.

Short-Form Creative Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology is a complete introduction to the art and craft of extremely compressed works of imaginative literature. H. K. Hummel and Stephanie Lenox introduce both traditional and innovative approaches to the short form and demonstrate how it possesses structure, logic, and coherence while simultaneously resisting expectations. With discussion questions, writing prompts, flash interviews, and illustrated key concepts, the book covers: - Prose poetry - Flash fiction - Micro memoir - Lyric essay - Cross-genre/hybrid writing . . . and much more. Short-Form Creative Writing also includes an anthology, offering inspiring examples of short-form writing in all of the styles covered by the book, including work by Charles Baudelaire, Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Grant Faulkner, Ilya Kaminsky, Jamaica Kincaid, and many others.

"Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that's what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook."--Los Angeles Times From the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry. With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver's prolific mind--a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

Robert Hass--former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize--illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop. A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass's formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation. A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets. "Robert Hass is so intelligent that to read his poetry or prose, or to hear him speak, gives one an almost visceral pleasure." --Carolyn Kizer, The New York Times Book Review

The Inspired Poet, which comes out of years of teaching and leading workshops, offers writing exercises, prompts, poems, and facts for poets, teachers, workshop leaders, and prose writers. They are meant to be invites for the Muses to come visit. Even if you're not a poet and don't like to write, these invites might entice you to see yourself and the world in a new light. This book may give an insight into grief or a respite from grieving for something or someone lost--or for celebrating something found. The exercises in The Inspired Poet can be used for your personal writing practice, for writing groups, leading poetry workshops, and in the classroom. Both novice writers and established writers can find inspiration in the 37 chapters of this book, each of which offers unique exercises on such topics as structure, pop culture, revision, mythology, grief, relationships, nature, symbolism/imagery, women's voices, psychology/sociology, and personal reflections on creativity/inspiration.