Poetry. Donna Henderson's new collection traces the contours of the "eddy fence" where love and loss meet. In poems that confront a mother's illness, a forest's destruction, and the struggles to seed new life, she discovers a difficult beauty and passage to healing. Here we encounter a restless intelligence in dialogue with itself, seeking to enter the world more entirely through deeper and deeper seeing. "Though the forest be gone, still 'the woods were in the song.' So Henderson describes the thrush, singing on, like her, the once 'green and cool surround' nothing now but a naked clear-cut hill, whose logging and loss is paralleled by her mother's dying. In the transit of these light- filled, sensuous poems, an acute consciousness turns mourning to praise in large-hearted lines—'spacious…enough to hold all the trees / and their absence, and every other thing.'"—Eleanor Wilner"…strong and moving, remarkably poised in tone and unified as the expression of a distinct voice. Every poem in it needs to be there, the reader believes, listening to a consciousness meditating on loss in relationships with the human and non-human, and negotiating ways to affirm life, nevertheless."—Joan Aleshire "…remarkable…Its music is quiet, its intelligence is omni- present. The book has tremendous range in topic—nature, relationship, loss, spirituality."—Karen Brennan

The Eddy Fence

Literature & Fiction

Henderson, Donna

Poetry

Airlie Press

Poetry. Jessica Lamb walks the night rounds of the spirit in this first, unflinching collection of poems, keeping her accounts of desire and disappointment, loneliness and kinship, fertility and decay. The book is animated by a fierce, imperfect love—a mother's love for her young son; a woman's love for her long-time husband; a human's love for this afflicted earth. In poems of gratitude and lament, Jessica Lamb explores the private, and often silent, negotiations a woman makes between the longings of the solitary heart and the demands of marriage and parenting. In the midst of hunger, plunder, and surrender, she finds small stubborn signs of promise and renewal.  "Jessica Lamb is a miracle. Her poems render most exquisitely a palpable, deeply moving sense of solitude and union—with a partner, a son, 'the mysterious cloister of a grapefruit'—the light and dark of every day. This is a great book."—Naomi Shihab Nye "Steeped in loneliness, streaked with joy, this exquisite collection offers us fruits picked from oracular night, gleaned from daytime's sunlit orchard. Laced with the longing for separateness, Jessica Lamb's musical, sensual poems evoke the voice of a loving mother and wife …drawing darkness in, then / doling it out again, warmed."—Paulann Petersen "Jess Lamb writes poems that offer treasure in a few right words. The thing about time: so much gets away, so many wishes lost, the wheel of days taking us far from the personal empire ofplenty and past delights. But these poems give a new kind of treasure, shaping in words electric now what was live sensation then. She goes oblique from loss into a side-room she fills with hoarded sensations, tough little songs, devotions, and love letters to what remains.This book is that room. Go in and taste what you need, a raspberry passed from mouth to mouth."—Kim Stafford "Jessica Lamb is more than a gifted, lyric observer. She is, in a classic sense, a "seer," who inks directions for us to follow the journey down into bones, along the ocean floor, to the day of her death and the day after. She leaves tracks for us across the dew to the center of the circle. We can be grateful that in this quixotic country of the heart, this honest poet opens for us the door to where she quietly and gently tends both the mysterious domestic and natural worlds."—John Morrison

Last Apples of Late Empires

Lamb, Jessica

Poetry. In this book, poems compelled by the subjects of family history, parenthood, divorce, and the death of a brother become acts of witness and forgiveness. OUT OF REFUSAL to turn away from love and its inevitable loss, new ground is created: poems of lament become songs of creation.  "OUT OF REFUSAL rises from the hardness of sorrow, from the glittering shards of grief, '… transforming / cold surfaces of what / is yet to be learned / into an offering….' These poems wrestle with profound absence and terrible loss, yet celebrate the hard-won knowledge '…that love is / out of all negatives / a shadow on the water of possibility / the soul of light and stones, what gives stones depth….' With moving trope and imagery, with resonant music, Carter gives us song that 'blooms from stone.'"—Paulann Petersen "The poems of Carter McKenzie's OUT OF REFUSAL map the difficult territory of a family's prejudice, children growing and turning away, a brother's death…. [W]hat we learn in reading these unsettling and often radiant poems is that change can and does occur as poem after poem forms a witness born out of what she cannot ignore and refuses to forget in a necessary and moving journey toward acceptance."—Maxine Scates  "Her voices are both ordinary and extraordinary. Their telling lights up experience, the way Orion lights 'in the dark before morning…transforming the cold / as I see it / into companions.'"—Erik Muller "Grounded in the mysteries and solace of the natural world, replete with exquisite imagery and lyrical turns of phrase…these poems know '[I]t is never / over, cycles of sun and darkness.' Yet here is a poet who knows how 'to go out alone / on my own ship / every day,' offering us ways to live that are both resilient and transformative."—Alison Townsend

Out of Refusal

Carter McKenzie

Poetry. Most gardens aren't designed to accommodate beasts, with their rowdy and unpredictable behavior. Think of the tumult that might erupt inside a place meant to offer quiet refuge! But wait, is beauty not fierce and wild? With intensity and playfulness, through a variety of dreamlike settings, this collection takes old stories and focuses on their details as if they were paintings, and in the process continues the ancient and vital process of re- telling the tales we live by. "Anita Sullivan's GARDEN OF BEASTS is lyric, intelligent, flamboyant, and wonderfully well-made. Best of all, it contains a rare kind of intuitive courage. Sentences are 'cracked open' to reveal 'an adoration of mountains/at dusk,' a performance of a Saint-Saens composition transports us to 'the beginning of the world, before glass.' In a time when so many books are satisfied with describing a world, GARDEN OF BEASTS works to transport us to one we couldn't otherwise have known."—Greg Glazner "Anita Sullivan's poems are not message so much as music. She magically reveals 'How recklessly we live here in western Oregon/amid dark hills that move like mastodons/…loping beside the highway with mist astride their backs.' The poet sometimes puzzles, sometimes challenges, and always rewards the reader with striking, original imagery and glimpses into the mysterious reality of the other."—Barbara Drake "As Anita Sullivan's lines sing, we awaken to our own shape-shifting, our own evolving, our own stretch towards mysterious chords. At home in her garden or on a Greek isle, this poet knows that 'every house is an entire world,' and that the quotidian, revealed in all its power, offers the fertility of many worlds…Composed of crows, of Bach, of loam and seed and sky, Sullivan's poems create in us 'secret noises we've never heard.'"—Peggy Shumaker

Garden of Beasts

Anita Sullivan

Poetry. Moving from the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Northwest, these poems enter and explore interior and exterior landscapes. Using direct speech, humor, and deft metaphors, Cecelia Hagen writes about the emotional terrain of experiences that are both savored and plundered, resisted and surrendered to. The wryness here is unmistakable, and cohabits with poignancy as if the barriers between those often opposed states of being had been somehow melted. "I love the clear, sensual music of Cecelia Hagen's Entering, the strange and ruined beauty of this solitary poet's landscapes, the bristled and voluptuous memories of growing up, each rough truth: the knife that 'speaks to what it cuts' (saying) 'your turn.'"—Dorianne Laux "Entering is an adult coming-of-age book. Cecelia Hagen's perceptions are spot-on, giving us 'the eye with its attentive hunger/ or the body's appetite for flight.' Even the humor is wise. In 'I Want to Be a Man' she becomes a dog under the porch wondering 'what it's like/ to be such a strange, unlikely thing/ as a woman.' In clear, attentive language, this poet tells us."—Penelope Scambly Schott "This collection casts many nets, and it casts them far and wide—reincarnations, daily rituals, sex, divorce, memory, parenthood, out-of-body travel. In these poems, chicken necks thrown into the Chesapeake, blue gloves worn during sex, the thrust and dudgeon of crows, and a grown woman bathing in her mother's bathwater all occupy the same deeply felt territory. These are poems of experience, and they come from a body and a poet alive in the world, a woman who sees '…a vulgar beauty / I can't help loving a little more than I want to.'"—Michael McGriff "Quietly audacious and finely tuned, Cecelia Hagen's poems capture nature and humanity in all their seasons, all their wildness, all their tenderness. Entering is an exquisitely crafted book, breathtaking in its clarity."—Barbara Ras

Entering

Cecelia Hagen

Poetry. In a voice both down-to-earth and elusive, narrative and leaping by turns, these poems seek out the hidden connections beneath randomness and loss, from merit badges to galaxies, border collies to gravesides. In their irony and their playfulness, in what they say and what they don't, they help us to experience for ourselves the mystery that keeps interrupting our lives, a mystery finally deeper than words. "This collection brims with the mysteries, the epiphanies of startling, compelling juxtaposition and coexistence. Minor key, major key, dissonance, harmony: in these pages, we hear the odd, audible question; we're blessed with the longed-for answer. Chris Anderson's poems open their arms in an embrace so wide they astonish and buoy us. His is a world in which anything could really happen, and does. No matter how quirky, how unexpected, the next thing—and the next and next—always does belong in the luminous life of his remarkable work."—Paulann Petersen "Odd, thoughtful, darting, swirling, funny, poignant, startling—this is the most unusual book of poemstories and singingdreams you will ever read, period. Wrestlers and ukuleles, angels and spiders, the precision of rain, Mister Rogers and Abe Lincoln in heaven together … I mean, wow, and whoa, and for heaven's sake shell out the fifteen bucks and go sit in the sun and read this straight through, marveling. You'll smile and pray. Trust me."—Brian Doyle "Chris Anderson asks the big questions in The Next Thing Always Belongs, and answers them the way only poetry can: with the ineffable incense of confession, and wild leaps of juxtaposition. These poems are parables, told in the impossible logic of dreams. The result is a collection that circles the incomprehensible, and manages a grasp both fleeting and everlasting—a collection that demands to be read and reread over the course of a lifetime."—Tim Green "These poems are written with the confidence of a writer who can explore the capacity of language without fear. The title, taken from Richard Hugo, tells us something about Chris Anderson's approach: let the poem find its way through the complications and confusions of translating experience into verse; believe that each seemingly reckless transition is in fact a leap of faith in the oldest, most profound sense. And it works. This is the direct indirection of enduring poetry."—Richard Wakefield

The Next Thing Always Belongs

Anderson,Chris

Poetry. Stephanie Lenox's inventive debut collection CONGRESS OF STRANGE PEOPLE entices readers into a "federation of freaks" with voice-driven poems that sing a collective ode to our common strangeness. Employing humor, mystery, and a bold yet generous gaze, this book keeps company with a snake handler and conspiracy theorist, record-holders from The Guinness Book, Miss Manners, human cannonballs, Nancy Drew, and other characters from a family of outcasts. "To write so thoughtfully, humorously, zanily, and beautifully about dogs and cats, remorseful sisters and fumbling fathers, crazy record-holders and sexy snake charmers—every body and thing around us—is to live poetry. Lenox's life is animated into a colorful, deeply felt spectrum of discovery that spans 'a suspension bridge of disbelief' that we willingly believe and dive from, risking that splitting heart of fear and joy. A smart, surprising, and audacious book."—Henry Hughes, author of Moist Meridian "Stephanie Lenox's work mines the Guinness World Records to take metaphor to a sublime extreme. Peopled with its 'federation of freaks,' her book is euphoric, generous, gracefully obsessive. There is intense personal depth in all of these poems, which are intimate, skillful, shimmering with complexity and awe."—Denise Duhamel, author of Ka-Ching! "To enter this startling book, CONGRESS OF STRANGE PEOPLE, is to take an uneasy journey through the maze of mirrors, 'the other garden / our odd Eden, a tabula rasa of ludicrous acts': each encounter is arresting, disarming, sometimes grotesque, but always curiously familiar. These poems shed dazzling light upon human behavior and anomaly in order to teach us to accept, indeed love, the freaks and monsters stirring within. What a graceful, poetic gesture: Look, Stephanie Lenox tells us, 'that's how beautiful things get made.'"—Rigoberto González, author of Black Blossoms "Stephanie Lenox's poetry is so entertaining, captivating, inspiring, and delightful. Reading her work is like watching a brilliant trapeze artist. The daring young lady dazzles her audience with her skill, humor, and philosophy—flying through the air of imagination and creativity with the greatest of ease! I thoroughly enjoyed her performance and find it hard to come back down to earth!"—Ashrita Furman, official record-holder for holding most current Guinness World Records

Congress of Strange People

Lenox, Stephanie

Poetry. Taking its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's injunction, "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that IRON STRING," Annie Lighthart's first collection of poems lives up to the complexities of that sound, that difficult music of living. Written with a mature lyricism, these poems weave the thread of song through destruction and doubt, through quiet rooms and resilient hours. When reading IRON STRING we awaken to our own lives, into a world that is wider, deeper, and more dangerously beautiful than we realized before. "These poems offer the obvious pleasures of precise observation and lyric awareness. But they offer much more as well: This excellent debut collection shows us how detail and dailyness can be chiseled into a compelling shape by cadence and craft."—Eavan Boland "Annie Lighthart writes purely magical poems—they will rivet and change you, in all good ways."—Naomi Shihab Nye "Nearly every poem in this brilliant debut book ventures into unknown territory, and without posturing or self-dramatization. The authority of the voice, which I trust, comes from the knowledge brought home from these excursions, which are truly original. We often think of originality as a brand new way of seeing something, but it's actually the opposite. Genuine originality, which this book has in spades, comes from a return to origins, from going back to the source to see it freshly, free of all other responses and words ever attached to it. It requires a willingness to not-know, to be temporarily ignorant, to leave behind one's bag of tricks. This quality is rare, especially in early work. IRON STRING is a startling, masterful, surprising collection."—Chase Twichell "In our time of greed and distraction, 'when the dog who has eaten the moon / howls / when he finds it full again,' the deep music of the poems of Annie Lighthart comes like balm. As she tempers truth with tenderness, her figurative language, lit from within, has a gracious sufficiency exactly fitted to the need for it: 'let nothing be wasted, says the eye...' The next time someone asks me what poetry can do, I will give them this book."—Eleanor Wilner "Annie Lighthart's IRON STRING is a stunning collection of poetry. In ecopoetical terms it locates the more-than-human in life itself, through self-questioning spells of a dweller who finds the numina in everything. It is a poetry that takes what we call place—the struggle between the stationary and flux—and out of it makes a life, and out of that life imagines the world that watches itself ushered into being."—William Olsen "IRON STRING bears a title offering its readers a compelling promise—that of hard, beautiful song. And this remarkable first collection keeps that promise, manifesting a scope wide enough, sure enough, a vision deep enough to contain the music created when such a string is plucked, a string that can 'resound for a year.' Intensely lyrical, numinously archetypal, Annie Lighthart's fine poems both posit and prove the power of poetry's music."—Paulann Petersen

Iron String

Lighthart, Annie

Poetry. 2015 Oregon Book Award Finalist. Following "the caravan of mystery" through the point of view of many characters, Dawn Diez Willis's first collection enacts a pilgrimage into many voices. Ruminating on an everyday darkness, these poems lean toward the light within the fierce vitality of existence. With musical lusciousness and deeply felt images, STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS &amp; LIGHTNING unfolds like a peony, the lives like petals forming a single experience of complex beauty. "Dawn Diez Willis's STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS &amp; LIGHTNING is a quietly startling book and a strong debut. In poem after poem, we are confronted with characters in moments of spiritual agon—a contest between the manifestation of a good in themselves and their admission of an in-dwelling potential for small yet damaging evils as well. In their vividness of scene, their stark presentations of characters stripped down to their souls, these poems put me in mind of Ai's Cruelty, yet Willis's book might better be called Mercy for the counterpoint of compassion that radiates in every line she writes. Her characters are daedal birds swerving under judgment from a secular god, pinioned in forgiveness from a sacred one."—Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road "The social vision of these poems is broad and empathetic—but also precise. The intensity of Diez Willis's gaze gives STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS &amp; LIGHTNING a disarming immediacy."—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men "Each poem carries the clarity of a tragic vision applied to ordinary events, focused with a painter's eye for depth, texture, and shading. There is a profound sadness mingled with love that glimmers through and between the engagement of lyric with narrative. It is a remarkable, magnificent collection that calls for a certain tough tenderness in the reader, for a love of the beautiful and glorious to be found in all broken and wounded things."—Gina Rae Foster, author of heart speech this and Beautiful Laceration "A smile is a scattering of gulls and palm trees cut the sky with silhouettes. These are just a few of the many images in Dawn Diez Willis's STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS &amp; LIGHTNING that will literally steal your breath. You'll find here the seething distance of an observer give way to cherished truths, more revealing than any confession. Here are the utterances that make the knowable an intimate encounter with the unknowable."—Major Jackson, author of Holding Company

Still Life with Judas & Lightning

Willis, Dawn Diez

Poetry. Tim Shaner's PICTURE X is a journey through the "poethics" of nature writing in a time marked by the catastrophes of war and impending environmental collapse. Rather than heed Thoreau's admonishment to leave the domesticated world behind on one's walks through the Wild, Shaner does the opposite, bringing the schizophrenic chatter of postmodernity into the built environment of the park, in this case Spencer Butte, a wooded park at the southern tip of Eugene, Oregon. Here, the poet refuses to yield entirely to what Thoreau calls the "subtle magnetism of Nature" in place of confronting the political realities traditionally buried by the picturesque. "In Tim Shaner's PICTURE X, a poet from 'back east,' floored by the natural beauty of the west, confesses his desire to enter into its majesty without tripping over the undergrowth of clichéd naturalism. Irresistibly drawn into description by the manifold shapeliness of the environment, he registers his resistance through a series of startling, mimetic mindscapes. Many hilarious and/or catastrophic moments ensue. It's a wild ride! 'These trees / you know / they're so / lazy — / they just / stand there...' Who can blame them?"—Kit Robinson "Bemused, bewildered, bedeviled, these poems are imbued with the everyday charm of companionability. Shaner mixes close observations of the social, natural, and linguistic, offering, along the way, philosophical reflections on working, living, and becoming a being being."—Charles Bernstein

Picture X

Shaner, Tim

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