Joseph Powell
Joseph Powell was born and raised in Ellensburg, WA. He taught composition, literature, and creative writing at Central Washington University for thirty years. He was Central Washington University’s Phi Beta Kappa Scholar of the Year (2004) and was awarded Distinguished University Professor in Artistic Accomplishment (2009). He retired from teaching in 2014.
He has published seven previous collections of poetry.
He has also published four chapbooks: Aegean Dialogues (1998) from March Street Press, Greatest Hits 1980–2001 (Pudding House Publications, 2001), A Ring in Air (D-Press, 2003), and The Distance Between Us (D-Press, 2015). For his poetry he has won a National Endowment for the Arts Award (2009), an Artist Trust GAP Award (2005), the Tom Pier Award (2006); and twelve poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes from a variety of literary magazines. His book of short stories, Fish Grooming & Other Stories, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in 2008. He has also co-written a book on poetic meter called Accent on Meter published by the NCTE in 2004. An essay won the Victor J. Emmett Jr. Memorial Award from The Midwest Quarterly (2007).
He lives with Lori Chandler on a small farm outside Ellensburg.
Motion Against Our Moorings $18.99
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Poem from Motion Against Our Moorings
Love’s Language
This morning at six you rolled over, your face flushed with the drug of sleep, eyes just the faintest thought of open and smiled at my face which you knew was there, somewhere close and warm, a smile without guile or even real pleasure just a kind of gratified comfort and then it relaxed back into sleep almost as fast as it appeared, but in that moment, our arms entwined like sleeves in a dryer, love had never spoken a more cloudless word.
The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S. $16.00
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Read a review of The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S. by Bethany Reid.
Poem from The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S.
The Snake
The summer after your death our trees which most years were frosted and fruitless bear loads I have to unburden. Each room in the house is booby-trapped with memories of half-lost joys. So much fruit impossible to thin. An imposed simplicity takes on the feeling of an exile. Abandoned in an empty Eden, I pick raspberries, blackcaps, blackberries and freeze them on cookie sheets. Bags and bags of fruit arranged like prisoners, each guilty of untimely bounty. Yet the yellow-striped garter snake coiled in the leaves of the raspberry canes, waiting for grasshoppers, seems right, and the thin-waisted wasps I flick off the ripe fruit. Trying to blend in, I too wait in the green and yellow leaves, wound inside a fading abundance, arbiter of thorns, guardian of sweetness.
