Diane Urbani de la Paz reviews "The Madrona Project, Volume II, Number 1"

Shaped like a coloring book, The Madrona Project, Volume II, Number 1, invites the reader to open it up at a random spot. Found inside are vivid poems, stories and reflections—scenes from one strange and lonesome year. We have before us some five dozen writers, unfurling their thoughts, without fear, across these spacious 123 pages.

“I hope our songs will spark your imagination, rekindle, and breathe life into these embers of hope,” Hughes writes. “Together, may we envision a future that hears and honors all our voices.”

Jim Bodeen reviews Ann Spiers' & Bolinas Frank's "Rain Violent"

Rain Violent: This is a book of poems that fits into your hands. Small poems crafted.

Ann Spiers. Prophet and reporter. An elder poet now. It seems odd to say that, but I have had her White Train broadside hanging in my house since 1986. “The white cars / racketing past / bending migrants / paralyzed / over asparagus shoots.”

Spiers walking trails. Her practice over time. Touching earth and sky. Polarities and white space. There is no ego in the poems, not a smidgen of ‘look what I can do,’ Practice and how to practice. That sky overcast.

Thomas Hubbard reviews Larry Crist's "Alibi for the Scapegoat"

We all want to be understood. It’s a basic human need, transcending differences of race, geography, sexual orientation, even religion or lack thereof. We want people to understand why we do what we do, why we love those we love, why we make the decisions we make, why we are the way we are. Unconsciously or deliberately, we manage our appearance, our speech, information we include or exclude, and our actions of the moment, in order to shape how others understand us . . . and to provide an alibi for any aspect they might find unseemly. Larry Crist’s new collection of autobiographical poems and short stories, Alibi for the Scapegoat, exemplifies pursuit of this human need most eloquently. His conversationally-acerbic writing style fits the reality in which he grew up.

Sibyl James reviews Maryna Ajaja's "In Deep"

Like the masked deep sea diver on the cover, this collection of poems goes deep and its waters are international, ranging from Port Townsend to Moscow with many stops in between. Everywhere Ajaja brings up pithy bits of wisdom from the deeps, what Alexander Pope knew as epigrams, only this poet’s are far more original and striking: “Grief is a short word for a long phenomenon” or “Returning is like the horse that gallops forward frame by frame.” Or the one that for a time became the message on my phone answering machine: “History runs in one door and out the other / without being useful.”

Mike Dillon reviews Madeleine Wilde's "Notes from the Garden, Creating a Pacific Northwest Sanctuary"

Writing from her garden on Queen Anne’s southwest slope—one of Seattle’s most beautiful neighborhoods—Madeleine Wilde’s voice stood out. The garden, Madeleine often said, is a metaphor for the world. Madeleine’s columns might deliver detailed advice on mulching one week and insights into the aesthetic pleasures of creating water islands the next. She was not shy about sharing her love for certain gardening books or reminding us there is a proper way to stack a woodpile (do it “right”). A column on the art of raking touches base with Van Gogh rhapsodizing on the colors in the sky. Madeleine’s prose, at times employing a canny wit, moves fluently between the practical and poetic.

A Review of Rajiv Mohabir's Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, by Shankar Narayan

Uncovering hidden histories and languages buried in the rubble of colonialism is just one of the many wonders of Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, Rajiv Mohabir’s new memoir, which, like its author, is a beautifully hybrid creation that defies convention and categorization. Through interwoven language that’s part poetry and part prose, part witness and part myth, we are invited into Mohabir’s journey—fleeing the racism and homophobia of semi-rural Florida, studying Hindi and searching for roots in Varanasi and Bihar, teaching Latinx students in New York City while seeking connection with South Asian progressives and queers.

No Sorting Grief: A Review of Lily is Leaving by Frances McCue

Thankfully, we have Lily is Leaving, Leslie Fried’s first poetry collection. The book displays an authentic and generous submersion into grief, personal history, shared tragedy and longing. Fried, who is Steven Jesse Bernstein’s widow (Bernstein was the poet, punk rock hero and spoken word performer before there was spoken word who died by his own hand thirty years ago this year), began her own arts career as a set designer. For thirty years, she worked in plaster and paint depicting scenery for film and theater. She came to poetry later, after her life with Bernstein, and she took to it with both humility and gusto, taking courses at Hugo House, reaching out to other writers and editors, and going back and back to her verse, recalibrating it.

Larry Crist reviews The Madrona Project Vol. I: A Festschrift for Clemens Starck

A Festschrift for Clemens Starck is a wonderful tribute and introduction to this long under-recognized poet and craftsman, and I’m looking forward to tracking down more of his work in the near future.

Matt Briggs reviews Polly Buckingham's the river people

Public spaces are populated and hardly empty but somehow the people who live here are not on trend, not counted, as if they are not visible while they shop in the forgotten chain store or drive along the abandoned highway.

Mike Dillon reviews Ron Chew's MY UNFORGOTTEN SEATTLE

But the narrative of any life, especially of the shy, cannot fully capture the interior drama between the contemplative observer and the public figure. That drama, a sort of Proustian, pilgrim’s progress, is the undertow that moves through Chew’s life and makes My Unforgotten Seattle, ultimately, moving.

Thomas Hubbard reviews Frank Rossini's "last confession"

What you notice in the world around you may change after you read Rossini's Last Confession, a poetic overview of what has happened around him in four stages of his life.

book reviewsPhoebe BoscheApril 22, 2021raven chronicles, Frank Rossini, poetry, last confession, Oregon poetsComment

Christopher J. Jarmick Reviews Hold Fast by Holly J. Hughes

Phoebe BoscheApril 1, 2021

Book Reviews