Ed Skoog presents poets reading from new books!
KEVIN CRAFT
Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. For two decades he served as a faculty director of the University of Washington’s Writers in Rome Program. His other books include Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005), Vagrants & Accidentals, (Pacific Northwest Poets Series of the University of Washington Press, 2017). Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves as Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.
Regarding Traverse (Pacific Northwest Poets Series, Lynx House Press, 2024): Craft’s third collection explores the music, the miscues, the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life. It’s a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee’s journey toward self-knowledge, a son’s journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent, navigating the cross-currents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss. It is also a history of walking, of moving through the world at human speed.
REBECCA WADLINGER
Rebecca Wadlinger was born in Pennsylvania, where she attended the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, and her doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Her poetry has appeared in publications like The Best New Poets anthology, Tin House, Ploughshares, and Mid-American Review, among others. She is the translator of Norwegian poet Gro Dahle’s collection A Hundred Thousand Hours (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013).
Terror, Terrible, Terrific (Octopus Books, 2022) is a dark, imaginative collection with a distinct love of language, melancholy humor, and affinity for noticing the remarkable in the unremarkable. Working in the heritage of surrealist poets like Tate or Edson, Wadlinger writes with both expansive imagination and narrative control. She keeps “one horrid eye” always open (as Neruda said) to the unspeakable parts of existence while maintaining a plainspoken optimism that things will ultimately be okay. A short film based on the title poem is available here.
BILL CARTY
Bill Carty lives in Seattle and is the author of We Sailed on the Lake (Bunny Presse/Fonograf Editions, 2023) and Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was longlisted for The Believer Book Award. He is a Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches at Edmonds College and the Hugo House.
Regarding We Sailed on the Lake (Bunny Presse/Fonograf Editions, 2023) : We Sailed on the Lake, Bill Carty’s second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy. These poems explore relationality in many forms, moving from gentrifying cities to coastal beaches, from the sculptures of antiquity to YouTube searches, cataloging passing days “of which light is the measure.”