From Bookselling this Week By Liz Button on Tuesday, Sep 20, 2016 Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore, Open Books: A Poem Emporium, held its grand reopening on Saturday, September 17, celebrating its new lease on life under the ownership of former customer Billie Swift. This past April, husband-and-wife team John Marshall and Christine Deavel announced they were …
This week, Christine Deavel, co-owner of Open Books: A Poem Emporium in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle and bookseller for 26 years, announced that she is moving on from the store to accept a position as a family and patient liaison at Harborview Medical Center. Below, we have her sweet letter to Open Books’ customers, followed by an …
From Shelf Awareness: Open Books Drops Readings, Promotes ‘Communal’ Events In an unusual move that runs against the grain of independent bookselling trends, Open Books: A Poem Emporium, Seattle, Wash., last month began a new policy of no longer hosting poetry readings. Owners John Marshall and Christine Deavel said in a store post that the …
What? There’s beach-reading to be found on the poetry shelves? You bet, stretch out on the chaise and we’ll dip into a few. Sometimes the summer books that beckon are playful, quirky, maybe even refreshingly unsettling. James Tate’s contemporary poetry fables fit that definition to a T, and his latest collection, The Eternal Ones of …
Don’t worry– this isn’t a scorching screed or a pitiful whine. It’s not even a calmly reasoned exegesis on the state of contemporary bookselling or contemporary poetry or (Lord help us) both. At least that’s not my intent. Lately I’ve been thinking about all the people over the years who unexpectedly stopped coming into my …
In our bookstore, micro would be the appropriate way to refer to the size of the staff. Staff, such a wonderful word, both a stick to aid walking and those who work at keeping an operation functioning. Since at Open Books there are only two of us, each capable of doing every task required, each …
2012 was quite a year for Lucia Perillo. Her first collection of short stories, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, was published by W. W. Norton and selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of the year. Her sixth collection of poetry, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, from Copper Canyon Press, …
Ah, the pleasures of a slender volume of verse. Like the one leaf left glowing on a late autumn tree, it is a captivating thing, made all the more powerful by its hint of the ephemeral, its brevity. Yet a tome of poems can be equally enthralling, with a pleasurable heft that comes not just …
We’re very proud of Christine Deavel, co-owner of Open Books: A Poem Emporium (and an NWBL columnist!), who just won a Washington State Book Award for her poetry collection, Woodnote. We interviewed her about the collection last year. Congrats, Christine! Congrats also to fiction winner Peter Mountford (A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism); biography/memoir winner …
I’ve been thinking about white space recently. Perhaps it’s the heat and hubbub of summer that has me pondering that cool place where there’s room to breathe. That quiet space for contemplation.
In poetry, white space, though lacking words, is as alive as any text it surrounds. It reverberates with the echoes of the words that came before. It shimmers with possibility—what will come next?
