Books in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series series

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 writers 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 selfs 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 robins 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 swans.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 didnt want any of it and I said so.

Inspired by Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer's Baltics and Yehuda Amichai's Time, Republic Cafe 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 Cafe 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.

Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, this book explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, DC, the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California.

Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, the author's innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell is author of a dozen poetry collections, including Love¿s Last Number, Gaze, and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected. He has received numerous honors, including the Washington State Book Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust, and three Pushcart Prizes. A military journalist during the Vietnam War, he has been for many years director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and now lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches in Eastern Washington University¿s master of fine arts in creative writing program.

Winner of the 2013 Washington State Book Award and finalist for the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award, Poetry Society of America, this title features poems that are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West.

Composed of staggered tercets, this book features poems that track the chaotic rush and swerve of life as we live it. It teems with expertly realized lyrics, monologues, and narratives, as well as poems based on historical figures from Ovid to Janis Joplin.

Traces a spiritual pilgrimage, weaving autobiography into a larger meditation on the materials of language and of the life of the spirit. This title offers the opportunity to experience a poet's evolution and to follow a creative mind as it reaches, through interrogations of faith, science, and art, toward some form of resolution.

Part of the "Pacific Northwest Poetry" series, this collection of poems presents us with a spiritual paradox. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. "How we live" is its major inquiry; its illustration, and the poems' major achievement.

The lives of the saints take place all around us, under us, so much of the earth they seethe in it. This book brings the author's voice to the meditative tradition. It presents poems that trace the spiritual inquiries of a series of linked personae adrift in bodies and a world made toxic by the residues of scientific experimentation.

John Witte's poetry sweeps the reader immediately into its crosscurrents, its passionate engagement and its ambivalence. Composed of staggered tercets, the poems in Second Nature track the chaotic rush and swerve of life as we live it. Wide open to the world, Witte writes with uncommon energy and urgency and his vision is exhilarating.Second Nature teems with expertly realized lyrics, monologues, and narratives, as well as poems based on historical figures from Ovid to Janis Joplin. The metaphors for human endurance, and the transformative power of art and community, are accurate and rich. Alert to the dangers of love and loss, Witte finds his poems where sorrow and transcendence converge. Like birds singing their desperate psalm in a clear-cut, his poems bring us a rare kind of hope.

Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories--first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs--but who no longer belong to anyone.Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GtPW3STVX0&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=10&feature=plcp

Organised into five sections, this work features poems ranging from the mythic to the personal, as does the central, poem "In the House of Wax". Their journey incorporates both anguish over the state of the present-day world, and an abiding, forward-looking spiritual resolve. It taps into an ancient environmental wisdom that links us all.

Anchored by the long poem "Cantata," which chronicles the author's pregnancy and the birth of her son, this book asks how one might reconcile one's simple joys with the world's larger concerns.

Traces a spiritual pilgrimage, weaving autobiography into a larger meditation on the materials of language and of the life of the spirit. This title offers the opportunity to experience a poet's evolution and to follow a creative mind as it reaches, through interrogations of faith, science, and art, toward some form of resolution.

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?' Attempting to answer these questions, this is the fourth in the "Pacific Northwest Poetry" series. 'How we live' is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, and the poems' major achievement.

The lives of the saints take place all around us, under us, so much of the earth they seethe in it. This book brings the author's voice to the meditative tradition. It presents poems that trace the spiritual inquiries of a series of linked personae adrift in bodies and a world made toxic by the residues of scientific experimentation.

This generous volume of new and selected poems by Christopher Howell encompasses three decades of his distinguished work, drawing upon all of his previous books. Dreamless and Possible chronicles his wide range of interests, expressed by blending elements of the surreal with biography, imagist economy with a storytellers informality. It also shows the development of his signature style, reflected, as poet Albert Goldbarth has written, in poems connected by deep thought worn lightly, and by large vision writ in small details.These are poems of palpable force. Howell thinks out loud as he works his way through what charms, challenges, and defines the human project. He questions, tests images and associations, and leaps, trusting himself, into midair. In consequence, the cerebral energy propels his poems beyond statement and into startlingly evocative modes, grappling with and sifting profound matters of memory, imagination, and grief, tempered always by joy.

David Biespiel's energetic language, so varied and musical and precise, is quite unmatched by that of other contemporary poets. The Book of Men and Women is his second collection in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, and as always he is the master of the long line, his words strung across its reach as tightly as beads. But new poems in this book explore the intimacies of the shorter line as well and display Biespiel's formal inventiveness and emotional range.The Book of Men and Women addresses our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global. The first section of the book is filled with the wonderful agitation of spell-making language. The poems are connected to the social and historical world, and yet at the same time, they prepare us for the mythic story about men and women that is promised in the book's title. The second section is more formally restrained and as such imbues the speaker with the distinction and melancholy gravitas that characterize the collection. We see this in the remarkable and fully imagined tour de force, "e;William Clark's Sonnets."e;The book concludes with a series of autobiographical poems that confront the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude. These last poems, composed during an intense three-month period of writing, as well as the other poems in this remarkable volume, showcase Biespiel at the very top of his form.

Accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. This book focuses on both singular and communal: the self on its journey through the world and our responsibilities as a people for the precarious state of that world.

In her wide-ranging third book, poet Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us. Post Romantic fuses personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, love of country, and a dangerous age moving too fast. Flenniken takes these challenging moments¿bits and pieces of childhood, marriage, cultural touchstones¿and holds them up to the light, seeking comfort in a complicated world that is at once heartbreaking, confounding, and dear.

Includes poems that are elaborate matrices of associations, translations, and re-imaginings; repositories for spells, memories, and tales; and concise prismatic shards, refracting meaning and beauty in an inscrutable world.

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven seriesΓÇöone of linked prose poems called ΓÇ£Another Letter to the SoulΓÇ¥ and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history.Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in ΓÇ£Another Letter to the SoulΓÇ¥ point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.

The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "e;empty"e; 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 "e;every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb,"e; 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: "e;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."e; 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: "e;one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?"e;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 "e;Atomic City,"e; 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