Download or read book Plume written by Kathleen Flenniken and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" 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 "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," 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: "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." 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: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" 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 "Atomic City," 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

Download or read book Pacific Walkers written by Nance Van Winckel and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Charming Gardeners written by David Biespiel and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel’s new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America. Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California. These poems explore the “insistent murmurs” of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America’s wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy. We are offered poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals — all in a masterful idiom Robert Pinsky has called Biespiel’s “own original grand style.” I should stop back there And stand on both feet in the grazing sunlight And hear this chorus of America singing. But I am so afraid of the testament of the delivered. from “TO __________ FROM THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN WILLIAMSON, WEST VIRGINIA

Download or read book Post Romantic written by Kathleen Flenniken and published by Pacific Northwest Poetry. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Post romantic, the twenty-first volume in the Pacific Northwest poetry series, is published with the generous support of Cynthia Lovelace Sears"--Title page verso.

Download or read book Light s Ladder written by Christopher Howell and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Turn Around Time written by David Guterson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most outdoor enthusiasts understand the phrase "turn around time" as that point in an adventure when one must cease heading out in order to have enough time to safely return to camp or home. In that vein, an award-winning novelist explores midlife through a lyrical journey along a trail.

Download or read book Luminaries of the Humble written by Elizabeth Woody and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems on those "who are not often heard from:" salmon, trees, edible roots, berries, deer. In Cricket, she writes: "Brilliant, he bristles as an undercover militant. / Hand winging in the air, / running the current of his backward hair. / Dogged, he insists on an argument." By the author of Hand into Stone.

Download or read book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven written by Sherman Alexie and published by Random House. This book was released on 1997 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaves characters, themes and language in 22 linked stories that evoke the complex density of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. The author is one of Granta's 20 Best Young American Writers.

Download or read book CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home written by Pamela Yenser and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Everything abandoned comes alive" Pamela Yenser writes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home, which becomes an invocation for resilience in a world filled with disaster at every turn: whether it's the wreckage of flying saucers in Roswell, or a brother and a mother who are irrevocably changed after a complicated birth, or an abusive father who is always in the driver's seat-whether it's by plane or car. Yenser does the difficult work of reckoning with trauma and the "family / history slamming the lid on truth." And though there's comfort in escape, and beauty to be found in the landscapes these poems traverse in a wide range of traditional and open poetic forms, Yenser reminds us "As long as you live / you won't forget," and there's danger everywhere. Lucky for us, we have a wonderful guide who knows her way around language and line, and is cunning enough to "have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." -Gary Jackson Pamela Yenser is a learned poet who knows the context, history, and texts of literature. Here she uses her supple and strict prosody to tell a family story about an abusive, daredevil father, a denying-praying mother, her "little retarded brother" ("She is her brother's keeper") and more. In airplanes and Airstream trailers "one catastrophe after another" happens to mark a childhood where "Visions of the devil / made you tithe, trade in the family silver." This astonishing chapbook delivers one revelation after another in poems exquisitely structured: "The past is a trap the Jaws of Life / can't break," she writes, "... but isn't this the work a poet is meant to do?" One poem in exact rhyming couplets is called "In the Garden of Demented Parents." Another, also in couplets, ends: "Look! I have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." Read this brilliant and triumphant chapbook by a poet who limns the tragedy and triumph of her life. -Hilda Raz Pamela Yenser's brave and tender poems spin together family history, personal resilience, and imaginative perseverance "sharp as that wreckage/ strewn like tinsel on glitter-/fields of tumbled rock" (as she writes in the title poem). Encompassing everything from a "bad weather balloon made of Kryptonite" to "a pineapple/ ruffled doily," Yenser juxtaposes the images and dreams of the otherworldly and the day-to-day life while also writing deeply of love and survival, monsters and angels, magic tricks and memories. This is a captivating and sparkling collection. -Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Pamela Yenser's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS refers to, yes, the Roswell UFO, as well as family relationships that are a parallel encounter. The poems' narrator sees the flying saucer wreckage as a four-year-old. She writes about this iconic disruption of the skies as a way to reveal the workings of memory itself. This is an exciting personal fable that blends journalism, verse, and narration. -Denise Lowe

Download or read book Poems from Ish River Country written by Robert Sund and published by Counterpoint LLC. This book was released on 2004 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the complete poems of poet, painter, and calligrapher Robert Sund focuses on the landscape and lifeways of the Cascade Mountains, Ish River, and Puget Sound region of Washington State.

Download or read book Singer Come from Afar written by Kim Stafford and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singer Come from Afar, by Kim Stafford, offers poems that challenge, sustain, and forgive.

Download or read book Theorem written by Elizabeth Bradfield and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theorem, spare images, distilled text, and the resonant space between investigate the legacy of secrets acquired in childhood and held through a life. Part illustrated dream journey, part lyrical interrogation, Theorem maps a luminous path of self-discovery that unsettles and upends. Beyond mere revelation, Bradfield's words and Contro's images "open up another possibility," writes John Yau. "The revelation is not in arriving at a destination but in beginning to map the journey, as well as in recognizing that one's perspective of past events changes as time goes by. This is the enigma of being alive and alert. This is what Theorem offers the willing reader -a place to return to in order to set out again and see what has changed."

Download or read book The Lachrymose Report written by Sierra Nelson and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sierra Nelson's poems are hypotheses of the evanescent world - its evaporations and evasions, its silences and speeches. "All ears, all eyes, all senses at attention," Nelson examines the tenuous tentacles that connect humans, plants, and animals, that tether us to the past - detailing the surreptitiousness of joy, the necessity of loss, how a body is changed by everything it encounters. Line by line The Lachrymose Report reveals how language, like feeling, originates deep in every cell, even as the wonder of these poems unfolds on an evolutionary scale.

Download or read book Underdog written by Katrina Roberts and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 writer’s “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 self’s 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 Silent He says one thing meaning its opposite. Before water starts to run, an ache in the jaw leaves me speechless. A packet of photos: each face has been cut out. This one: me, a child holding a wafer of sky - a robin’s egg. They used to say you have her eyes. Another: wrists slashed by light, lifted to offer the world a melon, caught up hair in a twist off the shoulders, the neck, my neck - impossible and elegant - a swan’s. Such grace shocks me. Who is this? That night before the baby died: barn owls calling across the creek. Did he say: Hear them? Never to be born at all; some people would say not even a baby, not “viable.” A small sound - sizzle of bacon curling on a flat black pan, unseen. His arms re-crossed. And this vessel made of ash, this monument rising from dust? I didn’t want any of it and I said so.

Download or read book Nothing by Design written by Mary Jo Salter and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful collection of verse––both light and dark, elegiac and affirmative––from one of our most admired poets. The title Nothing by Design is taken from Salter’s villanelle “Complaint for Absolute Divorce,” in which we’re asked to entertain the thought of a no-fault universe. The wary search for peace, personal and public, is a constant theme in poems as varied as “Our Friends the Enemy,” about the Christmas football match between German and British soldiers in 1914; “The Afterlife,” in which Egyptian tomb figurines labor to serve the dead; and “Voice of America,” where Salter returns to the Saint Petersburg of her exiled friend, the late Joseph Brodsky. A section of charming light verse serves as counterpoint to another series entitled “Bed of Letters,” in which Salter addresses the end of a long marriage. Artfully designed, with a highly intentional music, these poems movingly give form to the often unfathomable, yet very real, presence of nothingness and loss in our lives.

Download or read book Playlist for the Apocalypse written by Rita Dove and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives. Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness. At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”

Download or read book Writing In Place written by Kizzie Elizabeth Jones and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthology compilation of prose in essays, vignettes, memoir excerpts, short stories, newspaper columns, peppered throughout with poetry and prose poems from the Edmonds Writing Sisters, critique writing group.