MoonPath Press Banner

MoonPath Press Authors

[A]  [B] [C] [D] [E] [F]  [G] [H] [J] [L] [M]  [N] [P] [R] [S] [T]  [W]
(index by first letter of author's last name)


Light Entering My Bones

Sally Albiso  Olympic Peninsula, WA

Light Entering My Bones

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“I knew the story already, but I rushed through part one, as if it were a who-dun-it, waiting as Albiso in her well-chosen words and poignant images tracks the elusive tumor and its hopeful demise. I knew the outcome already, but, facing her death, Albiso gracefully turns not to what will happen, but to every direction the soul travels as it lives and contemplates. In heightened language, she explores angels and birds, trees and light, Judaism and flight, letting each beloved experience count. The last poem reflects on lines from Neruda to lift us finally into ‘a radiance that can’t be subdued.’”

   —Alice Derry, author of Hunger


Moonless Grief

Sally Albiso  Olympic Peninsula, WA

Moonless Grief

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

"Relationships, nature, art, love, loss, and beauty—all come to the forefront in the exquisitely rendered poems of Sally Albiso's Moonless Grief."

   —Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of Red Riding Hood's Real Life


LeanHouse

Marci Ameluxen  Whidbey Island, WA

Lean House

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Marci’s Lean House interrogates the relationships in a woman’s life, especially between mother and daughter, and the way these connections ravel and unravel one’s sense of being. Her stark landscapes and poignant portraits of loved ones demonstrate the thoughtful, attentive nature of the writer.
    —Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess & She Returns to the Floating World

Read an article by Barbara Lloyd McMichael the Bellingham Herald mentioning Lean House.


Sun Rising Into Storm

James Bertolino  Bellingham, WA

Sun Rising Into Storm

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Just as the bright rising sun can enter the darkness of a storm, these poems shine close devotion’s light on mystery, enigma, on any talisman cherished for meaning. Bertolino finds an object, a moment, a rich confusion and makes it useful, revelatory, and intimate. Read this book to savor his generous mind embracing the disparate offerings of daily life, and to find in your own circumference of attention a chance for small and precious miracles.”

   —Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar and Oregon Poet Laureate Emeritus

“Bertolino's new collection is a luminous offering of meditations and reflections. In Sun Rising into Storm, we discover that ordinary life, when observed through the lens of an exceptional poet, is filled with the radiance and tumult of dawn emerging to dispel the darkness of ominous skies. Masterfully wrought, these poems impart Bertolino's thoughts with an intimacy and generosity that gives the effect of being caught eavesdropping on his mind, only to be graciously invited in to listen."

   —Rena Priest, American Book Award winning author of Patriarchy Blues and Washington State Poet Laureate


Ravenous Bliss

James Bertolino  Bellingham, WA

Ravenous Bliss: New and Selected Love Poems

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“For more than four decades, James Bertolino has been writing love poems, poems of bliss so musical and urgent, so nuanced and bold, they’re ravenously ecstatic. These love poems ‘…draw nectar/ from the fractures….’ They join ‘…all small and large lives with what lifts/ us toward the sun….’ What a boon to have Bertolino’s love poems—both selected and new—in this one luminous collection.”

    —Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate and author of Understory and The Voluptuary


Each Leaf Singing

Caroline Boutard  Gaston, OR

Each Leaf Singing

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“After decades of intimacy with the turning of the earth and its seasons, Caroline Boutard has given us a book brimming with an ancient wisdom. In these poems our harried modern lives can slow down and remember the blessed comings and goings of all things. We can learn again what it means to grieve and celebrate in the same breath. Because we must. Trust this voice, ‘dumb on sun and sugar,’ to sing you into now and whatever comes next.”

    —Rosemary Catacalos, Texas State Poet Laureate Emerita


Why Horses

Anita K. Boyle  Bellingham, WA

Why Horses

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Anita K. Boyle’s lyrical poems, ‘soak up the earth’s sweet music in the afterlight.’ She cracks open the world to offer us ‘a spiraling nebula / a minuscule universe… a helix of tiny suns’ to clear away the gloom. She talks to us of waves, and sand, and gratitude; shows us ‘a hand-held miracle.’ In her clear, bright voice the poet sings, ‘an ineffable tune, / lovely enough to be unending, / and final.’”

   —Rena Priest, author of Patriarchy Blues


What the Alder Told Me

Anita K. Boyle  Bellingham, WA

What the Alder Told Me

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

This inaugural MoonPath chapbook by Bellingham, Washington poet and artist Anita K. Boyle thoroughly embodies the exquisite quality of voice our press envisions. What the Alder Told Me is a collection of wise, funny, thought-provoking poems composed of taut, effervescent language, quiet strength, quirky surprise, and unflagging passion. Flowing with natural imagery, as in "paintings with infinitesimal feathers" and "the rhythm of horses chewing hay," Boyle's breathtaking observations captivate. And Boyle’s unparalleled Weltanschauung is evidenced everywhere, as in the section head where she informs us "Seagulls are either sitting or flying some other place to sit." In the poem “Autumn Count,” we are apprised, "One counts on the ones who rise," and here readers can count on this rousing, incomparable verse for a transformational experience.


Chaos Theory for Beginners

 

Ronda Piszk Broatch  Kingston, WA

Chaos Theory for Beginners

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

"Smart and spirited, playful and intimate, Ronda Piszk Broatch's Chaos Theory for Beginners probes the patterns and uncertainties of our daily lives for the vast solar systems within us, inviting, into our human relationships of grief, wonder, and desire, the cosmos, 'tumbling/ its spent fireworks, blowing confetti/ under our door.' Reading these poems, I am re-ignited with possibility, reminded how the matter and movements of our lives, small as they are, are as exquisite as the complex galaxies, as brilliant and limitless as the stars.
   —Jennifer Elise Foerster, author of The Maybe-Bird


Lake of Fallen Constellations

 

Ronda Piszk Broatch  Kingston, WA

Lake of Fallen Constellations

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Some people get up every morning and go out into the world looking for God. Ronda Broatch does this and gives us her field reports in poems that make us want to believe that faith and survival are one and the same. She is a poet to be thanked.
    —Rebecca Wells, author of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Little Altars Everywhere, Ya-Yas in Bloom, and The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder


Impossible Lessons

Jennifer Bullis  Bellingham, WA

Impossible Lessons

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

In Impossible Lessons Jennifer Bullis entwines a Stevens like wit and attention to the music of words with a contemplative eye towards both nature and family. She makes the mythic and the domestic sing. Her language is both direct and incantatory circling through the great human paradox of our animal flesh and our spiritual ascensions. These poems give pleasure to the ear and to the heart as their kind and trustworthy voices present the natural world of the northwest, and the possibilities present to an intelligent, engaged mind moving through both “blossoms and smoke.”
    —Jeremy Voigt

Read a review of Impossible Lessons on the Brainripples blog.

Read an article by Barbara Lloyd McMichael the Bellingham Herald mentioning Impossible Lessons.


Ordinary Splendor

Judith Waller Carroll  Hillsboro, OR

Ordinary Splendor

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Judith Waller Carroll’s Ordinary Splendor evokes the magic of everyday living with direct language as well as incisive metaphors and similes: ‘the heron’s long neck pointed like a compass needle.’ ‘Such a fuss about the stars,’ writes Carroll, a poet who sees clearly the many miracles that are often overlooked but who concludes that ’at the end, / this is what I will remember.’ Imbued with insight and questions that celebrate a lifetime of experiences, these poems explore the ache of living with wide open eyes: ’Yes, I know. Somewhere, someone / is doing unspeakable things to another’  but also with understanding that there is so much more.’”

   —KB Ballentine, author of Edge of the Echo and The Light Tears Loose


Hospice House

Joanne M. Clarkson  Port Townsend, WA

Hospice House

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Port Townsend poet and nurse Joanne M. Clarkson’s words, inspired by mountains, seashore, and especially her patients, have been honored in anthologies and journals, danced in a palace and engraved in stone near the Washington state capitol.


T. Clear  Seattle, WA

A House, Undone

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“In T. Clear’s exquisite debut collection, A House, Undone, we consider what home is. From ‘a house of scant beginnings…raveling sweaters/and unpainted stairwells’ to the bodies we inhabit to ‘roaming the frozen fields…small enough to enter a honeyed hive,’ these striking and precise poems lead us through the hallways of the temporary. Whether the ‘wife/wanted out of the couplet’ or beneath a ‘sky scrubbed-clean of mudsock grey,’ Clear is a master of the image, the narrative arc, and the details of a story. Well-crafted, engaging, and constructed with meticulous care, A House, Undone becomes the beautiful architecture for poetry, where we live in a house of words on ‘a bed littered with leaves,/starlight for a roof.’”

   —Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides


Shapes of Time

Glenna Cook  Puyallup, WA

Shapes of Time

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“When I read Glenna Cook’s poems, Aaron Copland’s music plays in my ear. Her portrayal of life is simple, universal, and unnervingly complex. Cook’s Shapes of Time is an arc of a woman’s life, a life shaped by traditions and rhythm, a mirror of reflection. She gives us a litany of thanks, expressions of disappointment, unimaginable grief, unbridled joy, that in the end are unfinished—life cut short, for it is never long enough. We understand how she ‘will leave behind a long/list of books I wanted to read/friends I could have shared/pie...’ She compels us to ask don’t all want to share pie, to embrace life, its complexities, in the simplest, yet most poignant language?”
   —Josie Emmons Turner, Tacoma Poet Laureate Emerita

 


Thresholds

Glenna Cook  Tacoma, WA

Thresholds

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Readers of the book Thresholds will experience what Glenna Cook calls ‘the good purpose,’ the intention of poems meaningfully conflicted between fierce moments and tender moments that compose a life. In all her wisdom and experience, she still struggles to answer questions about love, devotion, loneliness and ‘this grandeur of the universe.’ These carefully constructed poems share childhood pains and shames. Like any poet, Cook plays subordinate to language: ‘I’m sorry/about my words./I try to keep them in/behind their white picket fence,/but they get out when I least expect it.’”
    —Allen Braden, author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood: Poems

Thresholds was a finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Awards


Rain/Dweller

Risa Denenberg  Olympic Peninsula, WA

Rain/Dweller

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“I really enjoyed reading these poems and, because I felt driven forward by them, read them all in one sitting. Part of the loveliness of it for me was the expectation of arriving at yet another arresting line—of being brought to a halt by something piercingly true expressed finely. I was also captivated by Risa Denenberg’s contemplation of that place where our most fundamental concerns as humans—love, death, aging, sadness, and the mystery of it all—meet the natural world. I felt myself in the presence of a great honesty about things that matter, and in particular responded to the idea that, despite our existential plight—maybe even because of it—life is a thing of great beauty.”
    —David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars

Upcoming Reading Dates

 


slight faith

Risa Denenberg  Olympic Peninsula, WA

slight faith

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Tightly crafted, wise with a quietly passionate heart, slight faith will make a reader leap and marvel.”
    —Michael Schmeltzer, author of Blood Song

“It’s as if Denenberg has split open her life and scraped out the interior fruit.”
    —Susan Rich, author of Cloud Pharmacy

 


Asking

Alice Derry  Port Angeles, WA

Asking

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Asking is what our entire country is doing—how to bear up under the loss of so many, these absences of our dearly beloveds. These poems answer by more than memory—by joining the beloved to the present in a way that makes asking itself an answer. An exceptional mind is at work here, lyrically, and with suppositional insistence, making a framework in poetry to approach and re-approach the death and the love—its successes and daily quandaries, its deep companioning—this is what really makes this book sing.” 
   —Tess Gallagher, author of Is, Is Not

Upcoming Reading Dates

  • Saturday April 8, 2023, 7pm.
    In persion reading. Pelican Bay Reading Series, Anacortes, WA.
    With Kate Reavey.
  •  
  • Sunday May 21, 2023, 3pm.
    Wilderbee Farm Cidery in Port Townsend, WA.
    With Kathryn Hunt and Tess Gallagher.
  •  

 


Hunger

Alice Derry  Port Angeles, WA

Hunger

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Alice Derry’s Hunger is so beautiful, so dense with layers of meaning and the weight of the unspoken, so rich in its language and rhythm, that the book as a whole just frankly left me breathless. These are poems of enraged tenderness, of estrangement, of questioning and seeking, poems of family and childhood, poems of loss and yearning and sustenance. I could hear in them, see in them, voices and shadows from my own life. I know I will be returning to this book again and again, peeling back the layers.” 
    —Molly Gloss, poet and award-winning author of The Jump-Off Creek

 


To Walk the North Direction

C.L Downing  Tillamook, OR

To Walk the North Direction

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

To Walk the North Direction by C.L. Downing is a narrative of a life fully lived, stories of deepening self-awareness and empathy toward the world with a voice free of artifice or self-pity. Downing’s writing blooms with energy, wit, and honesty. Through each poem, her integrity as a creator is obvious. With a style all her own, she grants her subjects full reveal without sentimentality, but always through her kind heart, which is why she can be trusted. Readers will feel their own life experience expand in Downing’s recounting of her time spent paying concentrated attention to the world. 
    —Caroline Boutard, author of Each Leaf Singing

 


Since the House Is Burning

Suzanne Edison  Seattle, WA

Since the House Is Burning

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Suzanne Edison’s gorgeously lyrical collection Since the House Is Burning understands one of the most important principles of poetry: that it first be a pleasure in language. Of course, these are often bittersweet pleasures, if a poet is willing to tell the truth of her experience as Edison does here (in this case, as a wife, mother, daughter; as citizen of a world on fire and a caretaker to many). Musically adept, formally precise, both clear eyed and unfailingly empathetic in its worldview, it’s a beautiful book—one any thoughtful reader of poetry will be glad to know.”
   —Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither, Honeycomb (Copper Canyon Press)

Upcoming Reading Dates

  •  
  • Thursday, June 30, 2022, 7:00pm. Eagle Harbor Books, Bainbridge Island WA. With Kelli Agodon and Michael Schmeltzer.
  •  
  • Thursday, September 8, 2020, Time TBA. Elliot Bay Books, Seattle WA. With Cindy Veach.

 


The Language of Tides

Lois Parker Edstrom  Whidbey Island, WA

The Language of Tides

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Eschewing grandiloquence, Edstrom’s poems take a pensive stance towards the immediate, the ‘ordinary,’ while quietly rooted in the rhythms of the natural world. A master of simplicity, her prosody carries a balanced, musical, clear stream of language with understated authority. ‘Poetry pinned me to bliss,’ sums up the poet, in full possession of her craft."
    —Lorraine Healy, author of Mostly Luck (MoonPath Press)

 


The Lesson of Plums

Lois Parker Edstrom  Whidbey Island, WA

The Lesson of Plums

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Lucky readers of Lois Parker Edstrom’s new collection will be treated to the poet’s exceptional skill in mixing the outer, visible world of nature, the inner, invisible world of the human spirit, all wrapped in a shawl of Divine light. Edstrom avers, ‘Truth is always a bit odd. How meaning / may be found in the midst of chaos if / we listen, open ourselves to the risk / of what we might find inside. And isn’t this / what art is all about?’”
    —Michael Escoubas, Editor and Book Reviewer,Quill and Parchment


Glint

Lois Parker Edstrom  Whidbey Island, WA

Glint

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“When a poem inspires you to wander down to your local inlet to view the spoonbills, herons and pied stilts, then it’s not unreasonable to say the poet has made a connection! Glint is a dazzling three-part collection containing poems of place, nature and family. Lois Parker Edstrom ferments, shapes and bakes words, creating an optimal environment for every poem to develop and flourish. Only when it’s reached perfection, she presents it to us, often with a subtle spiciness which teases the palate at the end of the tasting. Filled with humour, delicacy, soulfulness, and boldness this collection is worthy of world-wide recognition.”
    —Ruth Arnison, curator of Poems in the Waiting Room, New Zealand


Night Beyond Black

Lois Parker Edstrom  Whidbey Island, WA

Night Beyond Black

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

"Suffused with Nature's palette, the aptly titled Night Beyond Black is a delicately nuanced poetic exploration of shifting darks and lights, sometimes as interpreted by visual artists (Edouard Manet), other writers (Richard Wilbur) and always originating from her inner impulses. From Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night where the light makes darkness 'bearable' to romance's 'eating the bread of love' in 'flickering sunlight,' Edstrom showers light infused with her reflections of familial love as the 'least expected' granddaughter's pressing against the window at dawn catching 'the glitter of the world, ' leaves her equally spellbound. With this contemporary re-picturing of the Romantic sensibility, Edstrom's Night Beyond Black enriches us all."
    —Whitney Scott, TallGrass Writers Guild President and member of the Society of Midland Authors


You Can Call It Beautiful

Debra Elisa  Portland, OR

You Can Call It Beautiful

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Debra Elisa moves joyfully, with gratitude, respect, and generosity in the vast world she creates in You Can Call It Beautiful. She welcomes us into ‘the circle of friends who gather/in praise of poetry.’ In this collection, Elisa travels mindfully through the natural world where she lives, and where she sojourns, to bear witness to ‘the young/roaming streets of blood,’ and to the creatures whose names we praise with her—‘Yellow-Billed Cuckoo,’ ‘Malone Jumping Slug.’”
   —Willa Schneberg, Oregon Book Award recipient, author of The Naked Room

 


Something Like A River

Roberta Feins  Seattle, WA

Something Like A River

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“The paradoxes of geography and history--the world's, one's own-- are at the heart of Something Like a River. East and West, those American polarities, anchor Roberta Feins's collection in a way that allows for layered, subtle poems--maps to the soul's movement. Self-identity is clear, established in gorgeous lines like ‘Whatever I am/I took from this landscape,’ ‘I drive streets which still grid my dreams –‘ One of Feins' poems states ‘Though I live West, My Heart is East’ and the reader senses the tension inherent in that voice, but also the commanding grace with which the poet navigates--kayaks--the range of waters she has been given. Ultimately, what matters most is the here and now: oar in hand, the poet says ‘All enigmas seem absurd;/I’m in a trance’.”
    —Lorraine Healy, author of The Habit of Buenos Aires


Between Darkness & Trust

Lorraine Ferra  Port Townsend, WA

Between Darkness & Trust

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“In Between Darkness & Trust, Lorraine Ferra moves into the dusky rooms of memory, the shaded places of present time, ‘where something is always changing/until changing finally into itself.’ It takes a poet like Ferra, whose careful wordcraft and piercing vision are honed by long experience, to help us recognize that self, and what it can mean in our lives, so that we have ‘Another/day, another/chance to change.’ ‘Trust’ comes from an old Norse word meaning ‘strength,’ like the grandmother she writes of who bakes bread for her family so that they might eat when she lies down to die. Who would not trust such a one?

   —Samuel Green, Brooding Heron Press & Bindery


An Exaltation of Tongues

Paul Fisher  Seattle, WA

An Exaltation of Tongues

Buy from IndieBound
Add To Cart

Buy from Barnes & Noble
Add To Cart

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“The way Paul Fisher sees the world and writes about it is pure delight! An Exaltation of Tongues is full of astounding images and the wisdom of his shaman voice – ‘from the green blood of grass / to the moon's missing half.’ I love the nuances, the leaping alchemical word magic, and the vision in these poems – ‘sweet as stolen honey / ladled from the Great Bear's tongue.’ I love the way his poems leap between worlds, and the transparency of emotion is stunning. Every line has the magic I have come to enjoy in Paul Fisher’s writing.”
    —Diane Frank, author of Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines


Suits For the Swarm

Matt Gano  Seattle, WA

Suits For the Swarm

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Matt Gano, whose swagger and soul and verbal dexterity have knocked out spoken-word audiences for years, brings his staggering inventiveness to the page—where he also, and absolutely, belongs. Here are irresistible scenes out of the sagebrush and empty lots of a charmed and timeless boyhood; love from all sides—wild-horse young, and 94 years old; and the moon: brilliant, unexpected, new, "with … lemon-meringue peaks/ and eating-contest complexion." These are beautifully-crafted poems, alive with startling transitions, humor, and the wisdom that lets "the rhythm in the ride be what I write." And they’re pure pleasure.
    —Kathleen Flenniken, Washington State Poet Laureate, author of Plume and Famous

 

 

Read an article by Barbara Lloyd McMichael the Bellingham Herald mentioning Suits For the Swarm.


Life Drawing

Carmen Germain  Port Angeles, WA

Life Drawing

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

"The poems in Life Drawing come from a painterly perspective that loves the colors and textures of life. Germain's sensibility is generous: 'I rummage things of childhood/ to find lost blessings' and 'What is given astonishes.' A central tension of the book is the way she grapples with life's hard paradoxes: truth versus embellishing, salt versus sugar, blood and bone versus soul. It's a poetry that embraces the ordinary and sees art as a way to both praise, and make sense of, the world."
    —Joseph Powell, author of The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S.

Upcoming Reading Dates

 


The Old Refusals

Carmen Germain  Port Angeles, WA

The Old Refusals

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

During her time as a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome, she researched the work of post-war novelist Elsa Morante; some of the poems in The Old Refusals had their genesis in Italy. Germain’s work is influenced by Italian/American culture, especially the Little Italy that was once alive in the South End of Albany, New York, as well as Upper Midwest farm culture and the wilderness of northern British Columbia. Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico has a presence in her work. In addition to learning from poetry, she is also a visual artist.

 


OldStories

Tim Gillespie  Portland, OR

Old Stories Some Not True and other poems

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“‘With poetry around me,’ writes Kalia Kao Yang in The Song Poet, ‘the entire world is a garden of meaning.’ This is my sensation as I read Tim Gillespie’s poems, for they are rooted in a life enriched by reading the world through a teacher’s eye: what lessons yearn from this old book, this rusty story, this vagabond street, this twinge in an old heart quickened by a young life? His ways of seeing and saying reveal a hunger for meaning, apprehending, reaching through surface for grit. An errand becomes a quest, and homecoming a mythic venture. What was simple grows deep, and what was overlooked becomes vivid. Read these poems, and enter the garden of meaning.”
    —Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate, author of Wild Honey, Tough Salt


The Walk She Takes

Neile Graham  Seattle, WA

The Walk She Takes

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

The Walk She Takes is an idiosyncratic tour of Scotland, where a mile’s walk contains remnants from the Stone Age through to the present, all in fragments of standing stones, cairns, souterrains, brochs, abbeys, castles, tenements, and crofts. These poems explore how the layers of time in these evocative sites reverberate through our own journeys. They delve into how even dark histories sharpen connections with places—and deepen knowledge of what our past makes us, helps us see how to travel forward into alien and familiar biographical and natural geographies.


What Water Does at a Time Like This

Joseph Green  Longview, WA

What Water Does at a Time Like This

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“Whether figurative or down to earth, Joseph Green’s diction is apt. And his imagination ranges over ‘the slope behind [his] house,’ a garden in Marrakech, ‘little sparkles in the infinite dark,’ and—it would seem—all the spots along the way. If Green does anything better than making routine seem magical, it is making the extraordinary appear commonplace. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, What Water Does at a Time Like This is a wise and beautiful book.”
    —Knute Skinner

 


That Thread Still Connecting Us

Joseph Green  Longview, WA

That Thread Still Connecting Us

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

This new book by Joseph Green reminds me of the “handyman” quilts my grandmother used to make. Her genius lay in finding just the right pieces from old jeans, shirts, dresses, blankets, and arranging them in extraordinary order, carefully sewn, so that the whole and the parts were both something new. Green knows precisely what threads to use, where to tug, and how hard. These are, ultimately, poems of redemption, forgiveness, understanding, the scraps of a life saved up, puzzled over, and put to use, finally, with love and care.
    —Samuel Green, Inaugural Poet Laureate, Washington State

Interview with Joseph Green in The Daily News, Longview WA


Mostly Luck

Lorraine Healy  Whidbey Island, WA

Mostly Luck

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“‘Father Pablo, lord of the elemental,/your Odes my atlas,’ Healy writes as invocation and homage to Neruda as she begins her book of praise. And what praise it is, inclusive and democratic, solemn and humorous, touching upon time, weather, mythology, fauna, peaches, garlic, and even butterscotch pudding, as she reminds us how ‘the whole universe exists so it can be sung to. Even sorrow. Even guilt.’ Insistently affirmative and endlessly inventive, Healy channels praise through sound and syntax, and through a precise and intensely curious gaze.”
    —Michael Waters, author of Celestial Joyride and Gospel Night


Dream World

 

David Hecker  Bainbridge Islan, WA

Dream World

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“David Hecker’s Dream World is a magic carpet ride with poets and artists. Through illuminating landscapes, enjoy Whirling Dervishes dancing to drums and string instruments, along with his tribute to Pablo Neruda’s La Chascona, ‘The sections of his home were like the stanzas of a poem.’ Of Denise Levertov, he writes ‘We both laughed when I told her I was a “retired” catholic, a faith she had just joined.’”
    —Sue Hylen


Natural Affinities

 

David Hecker  Bainbridge Islan, WA

Natural Affinities

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Evocative poems beckon one to follow in his footsteps through the territories of youth and age, across the varied landscapes of Puget sound, Dakota prairies, and Iceland. Along the way, artfully rendered images capture the spirits of the characters who inhabit these poems, offering thoughtful reflection on the heart and human experience.
    —Kristen Gard Hotchkiss, Bainbridge Island poet


Tree Talk

 

Cindy M. Hutchings  Auburn, WA

Tree Talk

featuring black & white photos by James Rodgers

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Remember that summer day when a shaft of sunlight spackled on the white wall next to you; shadow of Poplar leaves, moved by a breeze, danced through the laced curtained window holding you rapt. Simple, delicate, beautiful ... compelling. TreeTalk is a thoughtful and contemplative work, and a delicate and heartfelt response to a chaotic world.
    —Philip H. Red Eagle, author of Red Earth - A Vietnam Warrior's Journey and the originator and co-founder of The Raven Chronicles.


Not Aloud

 

Chris Jarmick  Kenmore, WA

Not Aloud

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Not Aloud presents some 30 plus years of Christopher J. Jarmick’s marvelous poetry. Jarmick’s thematic territory is expansive-- family, relationships, the art of writing, philosophy, his patented poem starters, and much, much more. His language is musical, approachable, and memorable. His refreshing turns of phrases stand clichés on their heads: “The clouds/are not metaphors at all./ They hide the sky,/they get fat,/sometimes they burst,/but not with tears,/Mr. Tambourine Man,/just with rain.” Full of humor, acute observation, and deep emotion, Not Aloud is a collection you’ll want to return to again and again.
    —Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of A New Red, editor MoonPath Press.


Tangled in Vow & Beseech

Jill McCabe Johnson  Orcas Island, WA

Tangled in Vow & Beseech

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Through an array of poetic forms, Jill McCabe Johnson explores a deep sense of interconnectedness. These lyric tangles help us grapple with a life where the ugliest abuses of person and planet occur alongside a mother's love for her son, the grace of childhood innocence, the anniversary of a first kiss, and the understanding that "in this land" of "dogwood blossom, swordfern and fen" is "everything" we need to "believe."
    —Derek Sheffield, author of Not for Luck and poetry editor for Terrain.org.


Diary of the One Swelling Sea

Jill McCabe Johnson  Orcas Island, WA

Diary of the One Swelling Sea

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

In beautifully shaped, undulant, brief poems (or, one might call them entries in a daybook, bejeweled moments, cries from the heart) Jill McCabe Johnson asserts that the world, specifically the sea, is powerfully alive and available to us by way of the imagination. With precise and lyrical language both scientific and newly created for the occasion, Johnson faces the pain of degradation, yet also celebrates the joyous, nurturing nature of the sea. Diary of the One Swelling Sea is an intimate portrait of elements-become-flesh, rendered by a consciousness and heart large enough, and generous enough, to face the complexity of hard truths.

—Lia Purpura

author of Rough Likeness and King Baby

Read a review of Diary of the One Swelling Sea on Prarie Schooner.


Willingly Would I Burn

Laura LeHew  Eugene, OR

Willingly Would I Burn

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“Albert Einstein once said pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. The elegant poems in Willingly Would I Burn possess such purity, such poetic expressions of logical ideas. These poems blend math and science, presenting poems as word problems for the complicated times we live in. The grace and strength of Laura LeHew's voice vibrate from every single page.
    —Roxane Gay, Co-Editor, PANK

 


An Undercurrent of Jitters

Carol Levin  Seattle, WA

An Undercurrent of Jitters

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Carol Levin’s An Undercurrent of Jitters is a book of poems about weddings and marriages, whether longed for or forced or joyfully jumped into, whether failed or extremely happy. The poems are engaging, insightful, and well-wrought—a joy to read.”
    —Priscilla Long, author of Crossing Over: Poems

Upcoming Reading Dates

An Undercurrent of Jitters book launch at the Noric Museum in Ballard, Sunday September 16, 2018. Meet in museum library—such a wonderful room. Everyone welcome.

Doors open at 2:30pm, reading at 3:00pm. Then a party at Carol's place to help celebrate herynew collection An odyssey into facets of the subject of marriage. Within: laws, history, culture, rules, religion, commerce, gender, expectations, outcomes and personal dramas. Secret Garden Books are the host bookseller.


Confident Music Would Fly Us to Paradise

Carol Levin  Seattle, WA

Confident Music Would Fly Us to Paradise

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“The wonder of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince permeates Carol Levin’s Confident Music Would Fly Us to Paradise. Filled with ‘shadow[s] shaped like a moving octopus: arms and arias,’ the high art of opera cracks opens like a tasty nut at the circus. A one-of-kind poetic engagement.”
    —Karren LaLonde Alenier, author of On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles

 


Priscilla Long  Seattle, WA

Holy Magic

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

"Holy Magic leans into the palette of our days and lays out the case, poem by poem, that the light vibrations that surround us are more than a scientific fact, they enter our bodies, trigger our imaginations, inform our moods, soothe our senses. In 'A Glass of Bitter Ale,' we see the yellow tinge of a bruise, a raincoat glistening with rain and consider the tonalities of pee.

Hues echo and inform each other in these poems, much in the way life experiences paint and retouch a person's life. Long transmutes life's magic from color to syllables for our delight in these varied and inventive poems. From the tragic, via the mundane, to the sublime, Holy Magic hums in technicolor the song of our existence."
   —Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State Poet Laureate, 2018-2021

 


Gone To Gold Mountain

 

Peter Ludwin  Kent, WA

Gone To Gold Mountain

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“In Gone To Gold Mountain, poet Peter Ludwin brings to life the little-known story of Chea Po and his fellow Chinese gold miners, massacred in 1887 by Eastern Oregon pioneers. Ludwin embodies Chea Po and his experiences of breathtaking racism, homesickness, and dislocation. He imbues these persona poems, letters, and laments with the finely-drawn landscapes of Hells Canyon and China, glowing lanterns, and an eagle circling the canyon rim. Chea Po seems to have haunted Ludwin until finally, here, his life and death are told justly. We are the richer for it.”

—Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume and Famous


The Body, A Tree

 

Amy MacLennan  Ashland, OR

The Body, A Tree

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“Taut with precision and economy, lush with the music of Eros, The Body, A Tree gives us remarkable poems of the body—sensual, strikingly sensate, fully embodied. With Amy MacLennan’s innovative diction and memorable imagery, even the weather—that talk-worn topic—becomes newly alive. A summer afternoon storm is ‘…a hurly-burly jig shaking its way/ across the valley floor—fuss, heavage,/ blinks and streaks, low bellowed tone…” This whole book is a marvelous storm of lust and longing, anticipation and satiation. Reading these poems, I’m both immensely satisfied and pell-mell avid to read them again.”

—Paulann Peterson, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita


Terra Firma

Michael Magee  Tacoma, WA

Terra Firma

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Michael Magee’s Terra Firma: Sacred Ground is a staggering poetic achievement—a selection of poems written over the course of more than half a century. These timeless poems are vital to the tenuous times in which we live. In addition to spanning decades, the collection spans many thousands of miles crisscrossing the globe. Much more than a travelogue in verse, Magee offers thoughtful observations and unassuming humanity. Traversing countless roads from Pamukkale, Turkey to Tacoma, Washington, we are treated to allusions from literature, music, painting, photography, drama, film, television, mythology, philosophy, and history. But perhaps what is most enjoyable and profound about this collection is the poet’s wise and witty voice—the voice of a highly educated, creative, and critical thinker with a cracking sense of humor, someone who has regularly ridden the bus and trodden his hard-working bones until the soles of his shoes are holey—a soulful voice who sings for all of us.”
   —Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of The Autobiography of Rain


How We Move Toward Light

 

Michael Magee  Tacoma, WA

How We Move Toward Light

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Michael Magee’s plays and poetry have been produced and published in the U.S., England, and Greece. He resides in Tacoma, Washington.


Cinders of My Better Angels

Michael Magee  Tacoma, WA

Cinders of My Better Angels

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

This chapbook by Tacoma, Washington poet and teacher Michael Magee exemplifies the finely wrought emotional yet deeply intelligent verse our press celebrates. Magee’s voice is sure, succinct and intrepidly sincere. Cinders of My Better Angels illuminates our ordinary lives, depicting how illness makes us not less ourselves, but more so. In this incisive collection, direct, smart, darkly humorous poetry mines the gems of our fragile mortality with courageous, resolute spirit. Through Magee’s superb mastery of craft, the speaker of the poems and the readers become as one, all of us united under the same moon’s watchful eye, afflicted yet determined, ailing yet healing, “hoping for rescue to come along / in the shape of a period.” And as readers, we are moved and fortified by making intimate contact with the world of Magee’s Better Angels.


The Memory of Water

Brendan McBreen  Black Diamond, WA

The Memory of Water

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Here we have poems of quiet reflection on the natural world of ‘ladybugs and bees.’ And too, poems with strange turns in which we get off the bus at what may be the wrong stop to find we have arrived at—Mars? Not to forget well-placed jabs against bigotry, plastic, guns, and mass shootings, along with ‘radioactive dreams.’ Brendan McBreen’s The Memory of Water is a rich and gratifying read.”

—Priscilla Long, author of Holy Magic and Crossing Over: Poems

“Brendan McBreen is a respected stalwart in the Puget Sound area poetry scene. They promote the work of many fine poets, of which they are one. This new collection The Memory of Water impressively demonstrates their ability to balance innovative craft, wry wit, and poignant resonance.”

—David D. Horowitz, author of Slow Clouds over Rush Hour


Cosmic Egg

Brendan McBreen  Black Diamond, WA

Cosmic Egg

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

"Brendan McBreen's spare poems in Cosmic Egg combine humor, science, philosophy and life experience in whimsical harmony."

—Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Field Guide to the End of the World

"See where Brendan McBreen's humour, wit, and honest observation can take you in the cosmos—his and yours."

—Michael Dylan Welch, author of Becoming a Haiku Poet

 


Spring Meditation

Kevin Miller  Coupeville, WA

Spring Meditation

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Kevin Miller's Spring Meditation is a tribute to baseball in poetry—the majors, the minors, the players, the coaches. It's also a poetic memoir of a life lived with baseball in the foreground.

 


Sati Mookherjee  Belllingham, WA

Ways of Being

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Rhythms, images, and juxtapositions in these poems flow like waves filling and emptying, from past to present to what might be—all while glorying in occlusions. Sati Mookherjee’s lively word play questions our definitions, boundaries around spaces, and leads to fresh and original epiphanies…With extraordinary detail, this poet illustrates myriad ‘ways of being.’”.

—Sharon Hashimoto, winner of the 2021 Off the Grid Poetry Prize for More American

Upcoming Reading Dates

  • Sunday, April 30, 4:00 PM.
    Squalicum Boathouse, Bellingham WA [RSVP here]. Hosted by Village Books.
  •  
  • Tuesday, May 2, 6:00 PM.
    University Bookstore, Seattle WA [RSVP here].
  •  

 


The Marriage of Space and Time

Jed Myers  Seattle, WA

The Marriage of Space and Time

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“The vastness and ambition of his title notwithstanding, Jed Myers’ The Marriage of Space and Time is more often than not local in its concerns, even intimate. Such is the nature of this particular marriage, in which we all live. And die. This ongoing here and now. Also then. ‘Our sorrows meet in one shadow,’ he writes; later on, he concludes, ‘I’m old. I’m coming to life.’ Myers aims to see as closely and accurately as he can, and in his seeing, he gives his readers a way to see as well, and thus to be genuinely alive, in our own time and space, for as long as we have it.”

—Robert Wrigley, author of Box and The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems


Hitchhiking the Highway of Tears

Sheila Nickerson  Bellingham, WA

Hitchhiking the Highway of Tears

Buy from IndieBound
Add To Cart

Buy from Barnes & Noble
Add To Cart

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Poetry exploring both the interior landscape and landscape of the natural world—particularly the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. This is a collection of beauty and loss, relating the interaction of nature and human nature. There is a stunning light throughout these poems.

—Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of Red Riding Hood's Real Life: a novel in verse


Once Removed

Nancy Pagh  Bellingham, WA

Once Removed

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“Imagine if your best friend borrowed a coat, then returned it furred, teeth at the cuffs, bull’s eye inked on the back. In Once Removed, Nancy Pagh borrows cadences, images, and inspiration from favorite poets, then deconstructs selected lines, repurposing them to suit surprising new shapes. These poems capture graceful musings, the poet’s clear mind focused on the natural world, but also ferocity unleashed in the aftermath of love.”

—Carol Guess

author of Doll Studies: Forensics

 


Five Fundamental Forces

Pattie Palmer-Baker  Portland, OR

Five Fundanmental Forces

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“The fundamental forces in our lives might include parents, siblings, husbands and wives, lovers, the rain and the sun. As Guns & Roses once sang every rose has its thorn. In this stunning new book, Pattie Palmer-Baker delves deep into these forces with a narrative and lyric force of her own. The poems here are generous, vulnerable, grown-up, and a joy to read. Palmer-Baker is a poet of witness, and this book is a balm for any prick of a thorn you may have suffered in your life.”

—Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry

 


And Now This

Terry Persun  Port Townsend, WA

And Now This

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Terry Persun’s poetry collection, And Now This, tells a beautiful and heartbreaking story from childhood to adulthood full of life, loss, struggle, and a coming to terms with our lives. These poems transport us back in time to Beautys Run and a boy who was too far down stream to be called home. Poem after poem, we bond with the narrator who lives among invisible winds and who lets go of his song in hopes it may fly. Persun’s narrative style comfortably invites the reader into a rural, some-time-ago landscape where we question the actions of fathers while connecting deeply with the son. Because of Persun’s ability to share a story and his honest, poignant tone, I read And Now This in one sitting and found the moments and images in this collection stayed with me much longer than after I had set the book down.

—Kelli Russell Agodon

author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010)


The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S.

Joseph Powell  Ellensburg, WA

The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S.

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“I’ve never read anything remotely like The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S., Joseph Powell’s deeply loving collection that tracks how it is to lose the beloved one day at a time. These profoundly beautiful poems broach the place that Emily Dickinson called ‘internal difference, / Where the meanings, are.’ Honesty is a difficult art; you will feel its powers grieve and restore you, over and over.”
   —Nancy Eimers, author of Oz


Patriarchy Blues

Rena Priest  Bellingham, WA

Patriarchy Blues

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Rena Priest addresses those who crave ‘the meat of beasts with beets and leeks.’ And while she insists that ‘Nature makes you pay,’ her poems tell us that through a ‘wistful song of sighs.’ The world is not always comfortable, but her poems never ‘lose touch with the fluidity of the spirit.’ Patriarchy Blues is an amazing collection.”
   —James Bertolino, author of Ravenous Bliss: New & Selected Love Poems  (MoonPath Press)

Patriarchy Blues has won an American Book Award for 2018.

 


The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm

Bethany Reid  Edmonds, WA

The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Packed with a century of images and sensory, sensual detail of Southwest Washington logging, farming, and family, this book transported me across time, place, and generations. More than a collection of poems, The Pear Tree expands these people and this place into an inspirational lament, lifting family and home to epic levels of life and struggle, love and wonder.  

—Paul Marshall

author of Stealing Foundation Stones


Villain Songs

Tammy Robacker  Beaverton, OR

Villain Songs

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Tammy Robacker’s Villain Songs poems sing a world of menace into the light. Voyaging through a mythic-seeming land where everyday objects grow treacherous and the most vulnerable among us are used in spirit-crushing ways, she summons her considerable powers of exorcism and refuses to be silenced. With fierce associative play, finely chiseled lines, and a highly controlled sense of form, she dares to speak the hardest truths. If shame is a force that exiles us from ourselves, these poems rescue and reconstitute a home for the soul.” 

—Lia Purpura

poet and author of The Brighter the Veil


A River Once More

Matthew Campbell Roberts  Bellingham, WA

A River Once More

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Matthew Campbell Roberts gives us poems filled with the music of a bend in the river. His voice is tranquil, steady, and luminous. What a pleasure, to be invited into the landscapes and inner life of this poet, ‘Just to sit on a log and guess at the tide / or scavenge for sea glass and agates / at the edge of breakers. Or do nothing at all / and not worry about the news or work.’ A River Once More is a radiant collection—a refuge on a beautiful shore.”

—Rena Priest

American Book Award winner for Patriarchy Blues


They Were Called Records, Kids

James Rodgers  Pacific, WA

They Were Called Records, Kids

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“In this exuberant collection of keenly observed poems, NW poet James Rodgers celebrates the contemporary music scene: the people, the places, the tunes that are the soundtrack of our lives. Above all, this book is a tribute to the experience of listening, watching, taking it all in—participating in the act, the fact, the sheer joy of making and hearing music. Rodgers shares his personal take on the music of Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Prince, David Bowie, Elvis, The Paperboys, Sarah Vaughan, and a friend named Mark. This poet/word musician, travels with us to New Zealand, Ireland, from the Jokhang to the Oktoberfest to Kathmandu, from The Rainbow Café and Zola’s Café to concert halls and open mic venues where he observes audiences and individuals with delight.” 
    —Marjorie Rommel, Poet Laureate of Auburn, WA from 2015-2017

 


All Our Brown-Skinned Angels

Raúl Sánchez  Seattle, WA

All Our Brown-Skinned Angels

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Mexican-American Raúl Sánchez raises his poetic voice in languages twice removed from the indigenous language of his ancestors, but with well more than double the fervor. Language is embodied in the essence of personal and political struggle, as evidenced in these lines from the poem “My Father Was a Bracero”: “He didn’t want me to live / by my strong back, strong arms / but by my words”. This ardent inaugural collection by Sánchez is filled with poems of identity—cultural, familial and personal. All Our Brown-Skinned Angels is part civil protest, part personal celebration, completely impassioned.

 


The Strange & Beautiful Life of Daniel Raskovich

Victor David Sandiego  Seattle, WA

The Strange & Beautiful Life of Daniel Raskovich

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

Victor David Sandiego’s The Strange and Beautiful Life of Daniel Raskovich, an imagined biography of an odd everyman character, is darkly funny and strangely poignant. Sandiego offers a frank take on contemporary society with verse that is clean, clear and direct, and tantalizing enough to keep us wanting more. Episode after bizarre episode leaves the reader feeling off-balance, hopping on one leg (the good one) like Daniel, but perhaps this is the precise vantage one needs to view our lives more candidly. The starkly lovely, sometimes mysterious, graphical images throughout from photographer Ethan Hahn provide visual texture and figurative subtext to the Raskovich tale. As alarming or reassuring as it may seem, Sandiego’s collection reveals that there is a little bit or quite a lot of Daniel in every one of us.

 


The Situation & What Crosses It

Amy Schrader  Seattle, WA

The Situation & What Crosses It

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

These sonnets are like spells, like mirrors, as in funhouse—, smoke &—, magic—, and even ceiling— (oh, the delicious, dirty double entendres!). They are sly forms within forms, these sonnets in the Celtic Cross, stories in poems, the made-up in the real, the work of life in a game. In these playful, lovely pieces, Schrader shows us language trying to see and hear itself, admire and rip its own skins. Reading these poems is like reading all the secrets wedged in all the bottles floating in all the oceans, but be careful—they’re stuffed with bits of heartbreak and danger.

—Arlene Kim

author of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?

 


Intention Tremor

Tamara Kaye Sellman  Kingston, WA

Intention Tremor

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Sellman’s intelligence and experience as a prose writer comes through in this hybrid manuscript: poems that bristle with scientific accuracy, prose pieces that border on dreamy intensity and longing.”
   —Jeannine Hall Gailey, author, Field Guide to the End of the World

Intention Tremor approaches the MS odyssey with wit, grace and an inquiring mind that is refreshingly quirky at times.
   —Jennifer Culkin, author, A Final Arc of Sky


Pages of White Sky

Tim Sherry  Tacoma, WA

Pages of White Sky

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

"It's refreshing to read a poet who seems to have missed the postmodern memo about serial randomness being the mind's great roadtrip. Instead, what we get is a boots-on-the-ground empathy from a real wanderer who has Richard Hugo's eye for out-of-the-way topics and towns, a sincerity that doesn't take selfies, a heart that can brake for a blue dress or blueberry patch. With a disarming candor, Sherry's poems examine small moments which can ramify into large questions, humor, self-scrutiny, guilt, love, or praise. In the end, what the reader gets to examine is the 'archaeology of a life dedicated to the world.' This book will remind you why you love poetry.”
    —Joseph Powell, author of The Slow Subtraction: ALS


One of Seven Billion

Tim Sherry  Tacoma, WA

One of Seven Billion

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“With conversational language and stripped-down wisdom, Tim Sherry’s One of Seven Billion is at once intimate and anonymous, revealing and evasive. In a time when many poets seem to value irony and wit, Sherry offers poems that are intelligently solid and emotionally honest. The speaker in many of these poems strikes me as a modern-day relative of William the Poet from the long, allegorical, Christian narrative Piers Plowman of the Middle Ages. He questions without finding answers then accepts that the act of questioning is what each of the seven billion of us must do to exist meaningfully. Posing such impossible questions can be a solitary process but despite the poet’s “instinct for loneliness,” he creates a community where Claude Monet, John Wayne, Lana Turner, and The man Upstairs meet at the center of the universe to celebrate life, love and the imagination.”

—Allen Braden

author of A Wreath of Down and a Drop of Blood


Between River & Street

Scott T. Starbuck  Battle Ground, WA

Between River & Street

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Mindful of environmental degradation, Scott T. Starbuck’s poetry offers those needed songs of redemption, rising from his love of forests, water, and fish. He has composed some of the finest fishing poems I’ve ever read— vivid, pulsing, and honest—with humble, understated humor and insight expressing great wisdom. Exploring the dynamics between the shared and owned, poor and rich, young and old, ghosts and the living, Between River &Street mediates our divisive, troubled times. Like the mythological Raven of the Northwest, Starbuck is a ‘Flamekeeper,’ and his poetry a bright beacon for the wild and sacred.”

   —Henry Hughes, Oregon Book Award-winning poet and author of Back Seat with Fish


Lost Salmon

Scott T. Starbuck  Battle Ground, WA

Lost Salmon

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“If you’re a fisherman, then Scott Starbuck is your man. Whether far offshore in a troller or on land far beyond well-traveled roads, Starbuck, as our guide in Lost Salmon, takes us to places where there are 234 local shipwrecks, and trout are being roasted over coals. In poems that are ‘an idea first/rising from nothingness and ashes’ or ‘in a boat/that almost sinks/but doesn’t,’ he asks us to see landscape and seascape through his eyes. Eyes of a true bioregionalist, reminiscent of ecologian Thomas Berry, invite us to journey further.”

—Thomas Rain Crowe

author of Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods


The Scarecrow of My Former Self

Sarah Stockton  Olympic Peninsula, WA

The Scarecrow of My Former Self

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“With vulnerability and gorgeous, lush imagery, Sarah Stockton presents a portrait of a life not defined by illness but circumscribed by it; a hybrid life of hospital visits and encounters with crystal healers, coyotes, iguanas. Stockton’s poems of simultaneous rage and grace illuminate the realities of the chronically ill.”

—Jeannine Hall Gailey

author of Flare, Corona (BOA Editions) and Field Guide to the End of the World (Moon City Press)


The Arborists

 

Molly Tenenbaum  Seattle, WA

The Arborists

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“Rilke wrote, ‘The things of this world… seem to need us.’ Molly Tenenbaum, better than any poet I know, hears the call of things—banjos, clematis, paintings of chickens—and translates for us their happiness and pathos. She brings this genius to The Arborists, set in a time of great personal loss and romantic discovery. This is that rare and wondrous collection that takes my breath—deeply moving, effervescent, utterly original and alive.”
   —Kathleen Flenniken, Poet Laureate Emerita of Washington State, author of Post Romantic


What's Left

Connie K Walle  Tacoma, WA

What's Left

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“In potent poems almost as short as the poet, Connie K Walle covers death, love and the passing tides of time. What’s Left also offers a candid look back at sex in the midcentury that’s as volcanic as ‘the shift of the/tectonic plates.’ This poet has a sparkly wit and penchant for O’Henry endings to keep her readers in suspense.”

—Allen Braden

author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood

 


In the Presence of Absence

Richard Widerkehr  Bellingham, WA

In the Presence of Absence

Buy from Amazon.com
Add To Cart

“Richard Widerkehr’s In the Presence of Absence is a book of loss and recovery, grief and wonder. These are poems informed with clarity and compassion, and a quiet lyricism in confronting the mortal world, the death of parents, and life-threatening illness. There is a freshness and ease of manner to Widerkehr’s writing and at times a kind of other worldly aura, ‘that strange gift from the other side.’ There is as well a deep gratitude that infuses these poems, that grounds them in the here and now. He is a poet who has ‘been dealt happiness,/grief, and two wild cards.’ And we are the lucky readers who have been dealt these marvelous poems.”

—Joseph Stroud

author of Of This World: New and Selected Poems


Call This Room a Station

John Willson  Bainbridge Island, WA

Call This Room a Station

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“John Willson’s poems are guides for wanderers. Such great tenderness and delicacy live in these lines, a softness of presence/absence in the rich fabric of birds, skies, highly attuned relationships woven through time. Mysterious maps of ancestral legacy vibrate as a low hum—people who birthed us, poets who birthed our souls, and the infinite winding roads—with so many meaningful points on the compass, so many homes.”

—Naomi Shihab Nye
author of The Tiny Journalist


A Bird Watching

Victora Wyttenberg  Portland, OR

A Bird Watching

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

Add To Cart

“What happens to the life of the boy hunting frogs, the father off at war, the mother alone in her kitchen cooking a French dish for the first or hundredth time? And what happens when one’s own mother, father, sister, brother, husband, daughter and son are all, as the poet writes, lying tucked in the dark, alone in their graves? Victoria Wyttenberg gives us a Master Class on how to live and how to grieve in these beautiful narrative poems. Nature is present, family and the death of family, trauma and love, all! Life is hard. What a privilege to be guided through it, at least within these pages, by such a thoughtful, talented, and dynamic poet.”

—Matthew Dickman
author of Husbandry