“Awards can be helpful nudges, moving an overlooked writer’s book to the top of a reader’s bedside stack. So it was for us with David Ferry, whose collection Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations received this year’s National Book Award. We understand why the judges chose it. This is a powerful, haunting collection, but subtly so (that’s part of its …
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 …
Though missing a few obvious mentions of people and places such as Garth Stein, Sasquatch Books and a slew of bookstores (it could be fun to fill up the comments with omissions), this Ploughshares magazine Literary Boroughs series tour of Seattle does make for a good pamphlet tour of the literary city. It covers most of …
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 …
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 …
Say you own a small shop of some sort and you’re a baseball fan and your team’s game is on the radio and your star pitcher is throwing a perfect game through six innings and it’s an afternoon game so the shop is open. Small means you have no employees and you pride yourself on …
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?
It surprises me how many of our customers in the store talk fondly about their e-readers, some even producing them so that I might see how wonderful they are. My somewhat theatrical revulsion and thorough unwillingness to touch the critters surprises them. And there we stand, looking at each other across quite a divide. It …
Christopher Howell is a stalwart figure in Northwest poetry and publishing. A professor at Eastern Washington University, where he was a senior editor at EWU Press, he runs Lynx House Press, a small independent publisher. His tenth collection of poetry, Gaze, was published early in 2012 by Milkweed Editions. Meeting Chris Howell, one finds him …
