books collector's corner

Winner of the 2000 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man-child who lives among a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters in the rural South. Manning’s poetry has “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” observes series judge W. S. Merwin.

Bell's 19th collection of poetry explores the impact of the Iraq conflict.

This collection is the poet’s first book since her highly acclaimed When Sky Lets Go. Her narrative skills continue to delight with an energetic intelligence and depth of feeling as well as startling wisdom in her allegorical style.

Eleanor Wilner loosens the attachments of traditional figures to the old historical ground and sets them free—to suggest how it might have been otherwise, and might still be. This is the most important book yet from the acclaimed poet and MacArthur prize winner. “In a book of poems, one is happy to find half a dozen remarkable performances—poems worth rereading and even committing to memory. In Otherwise—which is splendid from the title on—it would be hard to find half a dozen which failed to equal Wilner’s stratospheric standard.” – David Slavit, Seven Arts (Note: Hardcover edition issued without dust-jacket.)

This is the story of how the Mariners went from the bottom to the top of Major League Baseball, and how Seattle shed some of its backwater instincts to become a city with record-setting passion for the game. Veteran Seattle sports columnist Art Thiel goes behind the headlines to reveal for the first time the untold stories of miracle seasons and perils barely escaped.

To have found Ed Pavlic’s Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue gave this judge an infusion of hope. It’s a fully conceived book, speaking as a whole from the first lines to the last. What is in here belongs here, and what is in here in consciously shaped. Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories. He is, doubtless, aware of such theories, but the voices in his poems flow from a denser space, having penetrated a denser reality, returning via the imagination and its many discontents.

In this cycle of poetry and stories, Luci Tapahonso shares memories of her home in Shiprock, New Mexico, and of the places and people there.

Mary Daheim turns up the volume in her latest Bed-and-Breakfast mystery when indomitable heroine Judith McMonigle Flynn tries to extend a helping hand to a pesky new neighbor and ends up with a corpse underfoot while she and cousin Renie cope with Saks & Violins.

This beautifully written account of the author’s rape and its aftermath represents a triumph of language over what is often unspeakable anguish. Still Loved by the Sun transcends the brutal facts to reveal underlying emotional truths, giving dignity back to the survivor. An inspiring story of personal triumph and recovery, it is also a story of love and the tests of love that a crisis brings.

This second collection of poems is the 1981 Lamont Poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.

In this luminous book, Campo restores the link between poetry and healing, in lyrical prose that also offers “pharmaceutical” samples of work by a diverse group of poets such as Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Miroslav Holub, Audre Lorde, Lucia Perillo, and William Carlos Williams.

This “portable Carruth” gathers the essential poems from a major American poet, presenting lyrics, short and long narratives, comic, meditative, erotic poems, and reflections on the natural world. Note: signed by the editor, Sam Hamill.

How a handful of reporters and photographers mobilized Seattle labor and forced William Randolph Hearst to recognize the newsgatherers’ union in his Seattle newspaper. Signed by co-author Roger Simpson.

In 17th Century Italy, the Jesuits had more wealth than they knew what to do with. The result was the baroque style of art and architecture, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, often fascinating. Madeline DeFrees too has an excess of wealth, and it is all interior. The result is baroque poems of substance and charm, always beautiful and always fascinating. When Sky Lets Go, the rain we’ve hoped for and needed so long falls rich and lovingly on our parched ears. – Richard Hugo

This second book of poetry extends a search for identity into new realms of fantasy and physicality. He travels inwardly to the most intimate spaces of the imagination where sexuality and gender collide and where life crosses into death.

With exuberance, cunningness, and wisdom, Charlie Smith’s surprising poems explore love as a sinewy thing, resilient, capacious, able to endure gravel, glister, and tenderness, offering both sustenance and refuge. These poems are an affecting meditation on the mysteries of what drives the heart.

From the critically acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels comes a luminous and haunting story about grief and obsession, and about the need for meaning at the center of all of our lives.

David Plante was born and brought up in a French-speaking Catholic parish in Providence, Rhode Island, that was like an isolated fortress in Yankee New England. The nuns of the parish school wore long black veils and taught the children that they lived in le petit Canada, where they preserved the beliefs of le grand Canada, a country of suffering eased by miracles.

While the Seattle police vice squad provided protection, the country’s first gay-owned cabaret flourished in downtown Seattle at the close of World War II and for the next decade. This oral history of the performers’ lives provides rare insight into gay and lesbian culture that was mostly invisible in those years. Signed by Don Paulson and Roger Simpson.

Cascading from one page to another, the seventy poems in this collection read like a love song to creation. Manning extols the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all. Unpunctuated and untitled, the work wraps you in its reverie and reminds you of the many wonders all around us. Poetry like this is a celebration of life and language of everything that is.

This collection follows the cycle of a woman’s life and underlines what it means to be Navajo in the late Twentieth Century.

Written in the voice of frontiersman Daniel Boone, A Companion for Owls captures all the beauty and struggle of nascent America. We follow the progression of Daniel Boone’s life, a life led in war and in the wilderness, and see the birthing of a new nation. We meet the Cherokee, the Shawnee, and the Delaware peoples. We track the bountiful animals and the great, undisturbed rivers. We stand aside Boone as he buries his brother, then his wife, and finds comfort in his friendship with a slave named Derry.

The book presents innovative ways of interviewing and photographing survivors of violence and helps journalists understand the effects of frequent exposure to traumatic events on their own lives. The authors relate journalistic practices to the rapidly expanding body of literature on trauma, and draw on the insights of clinical experts. Note: the paperback edition is autographed by Roger Simpson, Migael Scherer and Scott North.

In this deft repositioning of black literature and culture, Ed Pavlic reenvisions the potentials and dilemmas where the different traditions of modernism meet and firmly establishes African-American modernism at this cultural crossroads. Offering new insights into the work of a variety of African-American artists – including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Robert Hayden, David Bradley, Yusef Komunyakaa, Romare Bearden, and John Coltrane – Pavlic explores the complex ways in which key modernist philosophical ideas and creative techniques have informed the black culture.

In his masterful third collection, Campo explores further the epic themes of his Cuban heritage and America’s newness, his work as a doctor caring for AIDS patients and his identity as a gay man.

The seven poems that make up this chapbook describes the nearly thirty-year exploration of the poet’s real and imagined ancestry; foreword by Gary Thompson.

No one writes with the power, authority, and poetry that Earl Emerson has demonstrated in his action-packed novels about fire and the people who make their living fighting it. In Firetrap, Trey Brown is a man tormented by race, by family, and now by a political firestorm that erupted after fourteen people die in an illegal Seattle nightclub…and because someone must take the fall.

Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steriods Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports.

In this “choral work of the imagination,” Wilner’s poems reach beyond the self to challenge popular assumptions, rigorously question beliefs, and unsettle memory itself. As the old gods dissolve back into elemental forces and passions, a contemporary vision emerges that looks back without nostalgia, views the present with mounting dread, and mixes elegy with protest against that which devalues life and sanctions violence and war.

An anticipated new volume from Marie Howe. Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time - during those periods that are not apparently miraculous? These are astonishing poems by a poet known as “a truth-teller of the first order.”

“The tension in Ed Pavlic’s poems is a language-cable wrought to swing you out over unnerving spaces, let you see and hear what they really hold, and bring you back up more alive then you were before. Dialogic, dangerous, this is a poetics of body and soul, music to listen to with all five senses.” - Adrienne Rich

In this his fourth collection of poetry, Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston Tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man.