Books published by Cathexis Northwest Press

High Shelf is a monthly collection of poetry, art, photography, and satire from around the world, collected and curated in Portland, Oregon. High Shelf XXV (December 2020) contains 70+ pages of world-class poetry, art, photography, and satire. High Shelf XXV showcases 21 Artists/Authors fromPortland, ORHood River, ORSeattle, WAGolden, COMadison, WISouth Bend, INCleveland, OHEasthampton, MADanville, NHBrooklyn, NYNew York, NYCharleston, SCAugusta, GADouglasville, GATucker, GANew Orleans, LABootle, EnglandAshford, IrelandHong Kong, ChinaYawatahama, Japan

In this debut poetry collection, Jesse Wolfe meditates on the journeys that carry us through life. In sections that focus on individuals, couples, and families, Wolfe employs a range of speakers and characters: male and female, young and old, wealthy and poor. Some have a clear sense of where they''re going, while others feel cast adrift; some reach back into their memories or look toward the future, while others seek an expansive present moment; some find peace and at-one-ment, while others remain in quandaries. Taken together, they offer a mosaic of consciousness, as people strive and introspect, suffer and heal, each of them en route through their overlapping stories. Jesse Wolfe''s poetry has appeared in publications including Tower Journal, Good Works Review, Mad Swirl, and Eunoia Review. An English professor at California State University, Stanislaus, Wolfe previously served as Faculty Advisor to Penumbra, the campus''s student-run literary and art journal. His scholarly work includes the monograph Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and a forthcoming book on intimacy in contemporary British and American fiction. 

Full Length collection of poetry by George Burns.Poet George Burns embodies what Emily Dickinson, at fifty believed, that "Great Hungers feed themselves." If poetic urgency becomes the blessing of "bees in your love affairs" and a "broken water wheel / abandoned in its stony stream," then it is also those great mysteries moving us forward, toward the gladly unanswered "If..." If A Fish is an ignited testimony to a writer wholly alive in his life --and this life, on the page, feels as kaleidoscopic and passionate as language's "fireflies / blossoming in a field" before us. Take "the very flesh of it" with you on your next voyage home, into the heart, the start of it all.Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You NervousIn If a Fish, George Burns lands with delicate intensity in moments of pain, redemption and unflinching honesty in this collection of poems that serve as lyrical memoir. These poems turn us, in the end, toward a well-earned wisdom.River Elizabeth Hall, High Shelf PressGeorge Burns is the most natural of poets. We experience his poetic voice as a deep, personal conversation in the American vernacular that Williams told us to write in. Underneath this apparent artlessness, there is a subtle and powerful artfulness-each word is perfectly chosen, absolutely right for the poem. In this new, profound, and generous collection, Burns engages those things in life that engage us all-family and childhood (in all of their complexity), the various moments that make up a life, the beauties and the solitude of nature, the tenderness of intimacy, and much more. We find a rare, careful honesty in these poems, a desire to tell the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth. This is a beautiful collection, a book to read and reread many times.Edward Smallfield, author of The Pleasures of C, equinox, and to whom it may concern

Poetry Collection by Collin Van Son. Collin Van Son graduated from Penn State University in 2018 with a degree in physics. His senior thesis, a short story collection titled "If You Don't Laugh, You Cry," was awarded the Henry W. Sams Award for Best Creative Thesis. 2018 also saw the world premiere of TARVA, an original play he wrote and directed with Penn State's No Refund Theatre, for which he received the organization's Best Director Award. His poetry has appeared in antilang., Typishly, and Cathexis Northwest Press, and several of his plays can be found on the National New Play Network's New Play Exchange.

High Shelf is a monthly collection of poetry, art, photography, and satire from around the world, collected and curated in Portland, Oregon. High Shelf XXII (September 2020) contains 80+ pages of world-class poetry, art, photography, and satire. High Shelf XXII showcases 23 Artists/Authors fromCanby, ORSanta Barbara, CALos Angeles, CARichmond CASan Francisco, CAAlbuquerque, NMMesa, AZTucson AZFort Collins, COAmes, IAEdina, MNDiamond Shore, CTRochester, NYWappingers Falls, NYMarcellus, NYYonkers, NYNew Castle, DECatonsville, MDWinston-Salem, NCAsheville, NCDouglasville, GAParkland County, AlbertaMoss, Norway

Dead Birds Of New Zealand.The Hotly Anticipated Debut Full-Length Poetry Collection By Christian Czaniecki. 86 Pages of tightly crafted, surreal, funny, and devastating poems. Czaniecki's voice is a unique and playful addition to American poetry.Heavily influenced in his 20's by the work of Dean Young, particularly "Not In Any Haha Way", and the poets that followed the New York school and Surrealist. Christian spent a great deal of his time since realizing he wanted to write poetry trying not to be a poet. He believes strongly in the human capacity to experience loss and the need to share that feeling through language. His ideas of how the world looks and the difference between how it should look are central to the exploration of large emotions that are, he believes, undefinable but aspirational. He also feels that there is no way to talk about the romantic ideas of love, joy, death, and longing without the companion elements life attaches to them of grief, addiction, fear, hubris, and noncommittal. There is certainly something being sought in his poems but if you asked him he would say its not his responsibility to find it, once they are written they belong to someone else. Christian was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2007 he received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and promptly quit writing for 10 years. When he returned to writing he brought with him the actual experiences of life he imagined and tried to convey in his earlier poems. He currently lives in Baltimore with his wife Morgan and his cat Fish. He teaches 12th grade English and Special Education and does other things sometimes.

Poetry Chapbook by John Belk, produced by Cathexis Northwest Press.John Belk is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University where he directs the Writing Program. His poetry has appeared in Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cathexis Northwest, Salt Hill, Kestrel, Worcester Review, Poetry South, San Pedro River Review, and Arkansas Review among others. His scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Forum, and edited anthologies. He currently lives in southern Utah among red rocks and stands of juniper."Igneous rock-fire and stone. The juxtaposition of movement and stasis shape this lovely collection by John Belk. The fact that we are 'hurtling through vastness in inconceivable rush' is countered by 'found' rituals that slow down an unwieldy sense of mortality. These poems ask 'How fragile are our carefully/curated selves?' This chapbook deftly creates a strata of 'selves' formed by grief, hope, death, love, and tenuous survival instincts. Individually, each poem uncovers layers such that reveal the 'memory' a rock carries of its origins from within the earth, the stories behind scars on a woman's arm, or a holiness in 'colonies of lichen.' As a collection, Belk's poetry offers a quiet yet stunning affirmation of how language 'made of the oldest words' will outlast our own 'weathering.'" Danielle Dubrasky, author of Ruin and Light

High Shelf is a monthly collection of poetry, art, photography, and satire from around the world, collected and curated in Portland, Oregon. High Shelf XX (July 2020) contains 80+ pages of world-class poetry, art, photography, and satire. High Shelf XX showcases 25 Artists/Authors from Great Lakes, IllinoisHillsboro, New HampshireWoodside, New YorkRockaway Park, New YorkNew York, New YorkPhiladelphia, PennsylvaniaBowling Green, FloridaArlington, VirginiaGreensboro, North CarolinaFranklin, TennesseeColumbia, MissouriLafayette, Louisiana Fort Collins, ColoradoSalt Lake City, UtahGilbert, ArizonaPinole, CaliforniaFresno, CaliforniaNewport Beach, CaliforniaSan Francisco, CaliforniaVashon, WashingtonCarolina, Puerto RicoLondon, EnglandEdmonton, CanadaDevonport, Tasmania/Australia

High Shelf is a monthly collection of poetry, art, photography, and satire from around the world, collected and curated in Portland, Oregon. High Shelf XIX (June 2020) contains 80+ pages of world-class poetry, art, photography, and satire. High Shelf XIX showcases 23 Artists/Authors from  Seattle, Washington Placentia, CaliforniaMountain View, CaliforniaIndianapolis, IndianaHolmen, Wisconsin Chicago, IllinoisBrooklyn, New YorkGreenlawn, New YorkScarsdale, New YorkHudson, New YorkMalverne, New YorkJersey City, New JerseyGreat Barrington, MassachusettsEdison, New Jersey Cranston, Rhode IslandTerryville, Connecticut Enola, Pennsylvania Richmond, VirginiaGreensboro, North CarolinaSt. Louis, MissouriLethbridge, CanadaNaples, Italy

This book-length poem is a magical realist journey, catalyzed by war and grief. The speaker walks, impelled toward the restorative idea of the stark earthly beauty and purity represented by Antarctica, and toward the love that he knows will be awaiting him. That love, and the creative and magical power it embodies, is both encouraging and sustaining. Of course, the journey takes the protagonist deep into both beauty and evil. The journey is born of desperation, but it is carried out through acts of will and grit and openness to experience, as well as a desire to actively re-envision and recreate reality. Poetry for fans of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabelle Allende, Laura Esquivel, and Pablo Neruda. "To read Clif Mason's lines is to stagger through the shimmering ruins of a darkening apocalypse, where the only salvation is the troubled beauty of the journey, and to find, somehow, that beauty is enough.  'We have this brief time,' his lines remind us.  'Walk with me,' they say.  And we do." — Joseph Fasano author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing “Do you want a journey AND a love story? This poem delivers both, plus an invitation (and a template) to “. . . take this leaden hour and make it gold.”                                                                                                                                       — Marjorie Saiser, author of The Woman in the Moon "The Book of Night & Waking is an expansive, expressive, heartfelt act of witness. From ghosted, forever out-of-reach American ideals through poignant personal landscapes, this compact and explosive chapbook, composed with a burning passion and infinite compassion, transcends contemporary politics to surprise, enlighten, and terrify us with its elegiac experimentations that, were he writing today, Whitman would be proud of. These are songs that “wreathe us like smoke”. These are songs that truly “play through me, / through you, / through endless night & waking.” — John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another & Skin Memory     

Valyntina Grenier’s FEVER DREAM / TAKE HEART marks a poetic “double debut” with a tête-bêche chapbook, two titles bound upside-down with two front covers, which can be read from either side.  The poems shape their sense from sound, but do not hesitate to critique/navigate/decipher reality with a feminist protest. Associative and dreamy, the poems also prove to be starkly political.  They explore how we are miraculously alive in the midst of degrading political and weather systems. Some of the poems derive their initial lexicon from source texts, but they all confront the tenderness and violence that mark our human natures.  With subtle humor, word play, and linguistic inventions, Grenier has written a surprising tour de force whose discrete short books, taken together, range from the sexual and sinister to the prayerful and divine. Valyntina Grenier is a poet and visual artist living in Tucson, Arizona. She was born in Lancaster, California, and educated at The University of California, Berkeley, and St. Mary’s College, Moraga. Graduating with an MFA in poetry, she is self-taught as a painter, installation and Neon artist. In both language and visual art, she pushes the boundaries of representation and abstraction to create a vantage from which to view violence and prejudice. An LGBTQIA artist and activist, her work has appeared in Lana Turner, JuxtaProse, Cathexis Northwest Press and Bat City Review.

A Monthly Collection of Art, Photography, Poetry, and Satire. High Shelf Issue XI (October 2019).74 pages of poetry, art, photography, and satire. Works collected from artists and writers from across America and beyond.  

A Monthly Collection of Art, Photography, Poetry, and Satire. High Shelf Issue X (September 2019).66 pages of poetry, art, photography, and satire. Works collected from artists and writers from across America and beyond.

A Monthly Collection of Art, Photography, Poetry, and Satire. High Shelf Issue VIII (July 2019).66 pages of poetry, art, photography, and satire. Works collected from artists and writers from across America and beyond.