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.
Writing Home
Join us at Imprint Bookshop in Port Townsend
for the book launch, April 2
A memoir
Anna Odessa Linzer
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.
“ . . . 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.”
New release—Available April 21
New and Selected poems
Knot House
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.”
“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
Read more about the award in a recent story from the Port Townsend Leader.
Chemakum tribal elder, Empty Bowl Press receive Humanities Washington awards by Kirk Boxleitner at The Leader
We were surprised and deeply grateful to have received one of fifty awards given by Humanities WA this year in celebration of their fiftieth anniversary, acknowledging Empty Bowl’s five-decade-long contribution to the humanities. We were especially moved by the words of our nominators: “The people of Washington State are fortunate to have a publisher like this, which originated as a quixotic idea from a bunch of muddy tree planters, but which has become a literary press of unique and diverse voices connecting the Pacific Northwest to the world, and vice versa.” We’re honored to be in good company with forty-nine others, including two of our Empty Bowl authors, Shin Yu Pai and Kate Reavey! For more details, visit the Humanities WA website. To register to watch the Humanities WA award ceremony, use this link to register.
Join us for a book launch event for Writing Home, a memoir written by local author Anna Odessa Linzer, also published with Empty Bowl in Seasons Unleashed. The event will take place on Thursday, April 2, at 5:30 p.m., and will feature a reading from the upcoming novel. Writing Home is a moving, lyrical portrait of both family betrayal and family love and the healing power of place and nature.The event will begin at 6:00 p.m. in the Stuart T. Rolfe room in Seattle University’s Admissions and Alumni building. It is hosted by the Seattle University Philosophy Department.
