KATE LEBO A Prayer to Cathy McMorris Rodgers for the Right Reasons to Wed
Work and beware any love thatâs jealous / of work
Work and beware any love thatâs jealous / of work
“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool. – Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, Almost Famous But Phil, our Phil, was so cool, in that stylish, cipher-ish, miserable way that makes a man handsome, impossible, unforgettable and rich, no matter what face he was born with, no matter what was in his pockets when he died. He used English like an invented language. When we first met, he drove me to Squalicum Beach and bantered about the moon until I ran out of jokes. We sat on a log to watch the night, swimming distance from a rotten pier whose final job was to touch all the water we wouldnât reach. Annie Dillard set her historical epic, The Living, in Bellingham. This pier could be home to one of the bookâs best cruelties. Phil hadnât yet read it. I leaned into him, studious. Later, a year after our paths stopped crossing, we shared a booth in a Bellingham bar, the one tucked into a …
“How can poetry, with only words at its disposal, work on us the way the world works on us?”
Jason Whitmarsh on the poetry of Richard Kenney
“when will we / be blameless again”
NOTABLE BOOKS (NW) – Fall-Winter 2014 The reviews included in this feature section were first published in our fall-winter 2014 print issue. Incarnadine, Mary Szybist (Graywolf Press, 2013) Readers have waited a long while for Mary Szybistâs second book, Incarnadine, and that seems right. In an age of gush and glut, Szybist works patiently; her poems exude painstaking care, every line fleshed out (or broken), every word placed (or erased), just so. I mean this quite literally: titles like âHow (Not) to Speak of Godâ and âOn Wanting to Tell [Â Â Â Â Â Â ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyesâ demonstrate how in Szybistâs hands words both fill and empty out the spaces they occupy (in the breath, on the page). The effect is helped by the lovely, large-format book design, which amplifies the white space around each poem. And concrete instances, like the sentence diagram âIt Is Pretty to Thinkâ or the aforementioned star-shaped âHow (Not) to Speak of God,â embody the lyrical impulse to make the felt world visible with persuasive tact. But this is …
Chart your own arrangement. As in: the starâs heat / looped into the black hole and looped again
The Winter 2013-2014 issue is now available and burning up newsstands around the globe, with new poems by Michael Collier, Jessica Fisher, James Hoch, Nate Klug, Kate Lebo, J.W. Marshall, Suzanne Paola, Hannah Sanghee Park, Oliver de la Paz, Emilia Phillips, Cody Walker, Emily Warn, and many more. It includes our year-end round-up of Notable Books, with reviews of new books by Mary Szybist, Robert Wrigley, Nance Van Winckel, Rebecca Hoogs, Kate Lebo, and many others which appear here in our Book Review page, online. The stunning cover art is by Stephanie Pierce, with additional visual art inside by Emily Gherard, Holly Mattie, Cheryl Sorg, and Rich Lehl. Subscribe now, or ask your bookstore to order and carry Poetry Northwest. (We are distributed to the trade through Ingram and Small Changes.)
Shortly after I moved to Provincetown Mass. in the Fall of 2008, I became plagued by a series of horrible nightmares. I had been told that my apartment at the Fine Arts Work Center was known to be haunted, and though I initially dismissed the story as a piece of superstitious art colony lore, the idea would seep into my brain when I was again sitting upright in my bed, clutched by terror from a dream. The thematic connection between the dreams was violence: or more specifically, the self-directed brutality of women as a counter-impulse to the outward-directed brutality of men. In this poem, which came after one of those fevered nights, Cape Codâs long history of whaling serves as the backdrop connecting these opposing archetypes. I was thinking about how whalers would voyage out to sea, hunting whales with their harpoons and deconstructing the bodies for their parts, which had many uses. One of the uses for the baleen was in âwhaleboneâ corsets â a common form of self-mutilation by/for women. The voice in …
The Seattle Edible Book Festival is a tongue-in-page celebration of the art created when favorite books meet innovative cooking. Participants encounter displays such as âA Sweet Car Named Desireâ and âThe Bun Also Rises,â in categories like âMost Punderfulâ and the âBest Young Edible Artist.â Then, as the exhibit time comes to a close and the award ceremony begins, throngs of people stake out their favorite books for a chance to eat it when the signal is given.
Following the recording, McHugh returned to the stage in a flamboyant, black and orange feathered masquerade mask