EMPTY BOWL
Empty Bowl, an independent press founded in 1976 in the Pacific Northwest as a cooperative letterpress publisher, publishes literary anthologies, poetry, translations, essays, and occasionally fiction.
Reconciliations
Preorder now. Available May 26
Mistee St. Clair
““In Reconciliations, poet Mistee St. Clair grapples with identity—as daughter, mother, wife, and, perhaps most poignantly, as a person searching for the very origins of connection. The poems attend closely to the intertwined bonds of land and family, exploring them across shifting perspectives and moments in time. This is embodied grief work, alive to both messiness and wonder. It resists easy summary, instead dwelling in the vivid particulars that draw the reader back again and again.” —Erin Coughlin Hollowell, author of Every Atom and Corvus and Crater
In Reconciliations, Mistee St. Clair’s debut poetry collection, she explores the universal condition of grief. Of Tanana Athabaskan descent, St. Clair writes of the loss of a parent, first through adoption and the cultural and ancestral loss that follows, and then, in a powerful sequence of poems, of the loss of her birth father to addiction and death. She writes of the challenges of mothering her children as they become adults and of finding a new identity as her marriage ends. In facing these losses, she learns that reconciliation begins with connections: with herself, her dead father, her children, her partner, and the world. Tinged with the bittersweet, grounded in place—in poems that range in length, style, and subject—the poet’s voice is clear. These brave, honest poems don’t skim the surface; they find deeper meaning, believing in love, hope, and renewal, ultimately arriving at their own spirituality, seeing life through the twin lenses of curiosity and love, even in the midst of perpetual rain.
Join us May 6, 5:30 p.m.
at Peter Miller Books for
a celebratory launch of Writing Home!
Order now
“Here is an extraordinary collection of poems that, like an emotional wildfire, sends sparks across our past—present and future—igniting long forgotten desires and dreams. . . . a thread I didn’t know I was hanging by is a haunting—deeply human—beautifully conceived road map through and out of suffering into self-awareness—even joy—that will be as relevant 1,000 years from now as it is today.” —Gary Lemons
Knot House
New and Selected Poems
Charles Goodrich
Knot House brings together a generous selection from four earlier volumes of Charles Goodrich’s poetry, along with thirty new poems. Readers discovering his work for the first time will feel they’ve met a new friend, while those familiar with his work will revel in finding fresh aspects to this multilayered poet.
At the heart of Knot House is a quest for a deeper sense of community with the land, the weather, the waters, and the creatures of Goodrich’s chosen home in Corvallis, Oregon. Sly, quirky, and infused with wry humor and a contrarian spirit, Goodrich’s poems reveal what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing,” the interwoven interdependence of all beings. With their nuanced and varied themes of building and making a home, love of family, and kinship with all creatures, these poems are, in Clem Starck’s words, “the musings of a latter-day Zen gardener.”
a thread I didn’t know I was hanging by
Preorder now. Available May 19
Peter Quinn
In a thread I didn’t know I was hanging by, Peter G. Quinn travels back in time and memory, revisiting the seafaring legacy of his father and grandfather and unearthing painful memories along the way. Quinn’s compelling, unflinching narrative poems are leavened with grace as he shines a light on these memories and, in later poems, celebrates the healing power of love and what it means to be a son, father, husband, and friend. Quinn explores poignant and cathartic events that seize the mind and test the truth while admitting frailty and courage, often at the same time.
In Writing Home, American Book Award winner Anna Odessa Linzer gives us her heart’s measure of that pain and also the hard-earned pleasures of creating life in its aftermath. She finds herself in the Treehouse, built in an old forest teeming with life on a deep, isolated bay in the Salish Sea. In this rich and lyric memoir, Linzer slowly, and with a poet’s eye for detail, charts her journey to discover and reveal the essence of home.
A Memoir
Writing Home
Anna Odessa Linzer
“ . . . just as two black brushstrokes across the
cream of handmade paper evoke a mountain
in the moonlight, they also join other nights,
other mountains, other moonlight. These
brushstrokes join to other days. Other words.
Sometimes the simple black brushstrokes
are enough. All we need.
The Treehouse became a gift of a dream.
Time folded in on itself, expanded, and
sometimes fell away altogether. Leaving us
there, perfectly. We might have been there
lifetimes, years, seconds. Who is to know.
Maybe we are still there.”
“Knot House is a tonic, a balm, a gratitude. Poems this well-made are an inspiration to make our own lives just as true and sturdy and sane. And beautiful. Yes, that, too.” —Derek Sheffield, Washington State Poet Laureate and author of Cascadia Field Guide
“Whether tilling the garden, sorting nails, or observing dying birds, Charles Goodrich writes with keen attention and tenderness toward the world close at hand. Ladybugs, honeybees, even mosquitoes, are welcomed as neighbors. The vulnerabilities of aging, the comforts of companionship and conversation, fall easily onto the page. This poetry invites the reader to sit and daydream among the wild tendrils.” —Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower
Of Note
On May 6, the fifth and last season of the award-winning podcast Ten Thousand Things, hosted by Empty Bowl author Shin Yu Pai, will launch from Acast Creative Studios. Ten Thousand Things is a show about objects, how material things carry memory, identity, and story within Asian American communities. This final season expands on that idea, exploring objects as agents of personal transformation. Find the season trailer (with an on-screen audio transcript) below!
Read an excerpt from Apprentice to the Wild, an Empty Bowl book by author Kurt Hoelting, on Terrain.or
Join Jackie Canterbury on Nature Now as she talks with Kurt Hoelting about his memoir, Apprentice to the Wild. Her interview on KPTZ 91.9 FM airs at 12:30 on Wednesday and Saturday, and at 5:30 on Thursday or via podcast.
Read a review of My Heart Is Good by Mary Ellen Talley at Raven Chronicles Press.
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