Ordinary Omens

by LeAnn Bjerken

Ordinary Omens is an exploration of moments in our lives that have a connection to the extraordinary. The poems seek understanding of both common and unusual occurrences, examining their ties to nature and the natural world, as well as the supernatural via the tools and rituals associated with faith, superstition, luck, and magic.

Here you will find a yearning to understand the past (both our own personal history and that of others) and how it influences our future. In these selections, Bjerken dives into the timelessness of love, the fearful and wondrous gift of motherhood, the presence of hope amid uncertainty, the power of faith, and the resolution of a repeated wish.

Early Praise for Ordinary Omens:

Ordinary Omens combines earthly beauty with cosmic magic. Each poem contains its own universe, paying tribute to our senses with detailed imagery, and at the same time, reaching out to the mysteries of the universe. The poetry touches the true and authentic inner longings of the readers and carries us toward deeper realms involving the intersection of our own personal language with a new voice from the Muse, the voice of LeAnn Bjerken. The reader will soar on the wings of pure poetry, poetry our world needs now more than ever.

—Nila J. Webster, author of Remember Rain
and Songs of Wonder for the Night Sea Journey

LeAnn Bjerken’s Ordinary Omens reads like a book of rituals, potions, incantations, and talismans for conjuring the magic that only domesticity can make. With trusting intimacy and captivating sensuality, Bjerken traces the ecstatic, headlong cycles of desire and fulfillment from which enduring love is spun. Her poems remind us that, in our loving and loved bodies, we are of the same dirt as the earthworm and burrowing rabbit, the same air as the birds, the same water as the minnow born ready to swim and make a home in—and of—this world.

—Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island

LeAnn Bjerken’s Ordinary Omens opens with a spell and then casts one. The speaker takes us from her birth through key moments in her life, focusing primarily on the experience of falling in love, and these ordinary experiences are made extraordinary through Bjerken’s surreal images. One of my favorite poems in this book, “Keep on Floating,” feels like a Marc Chagall painting in that it’s a real world made less and more real by being tilted sideways: I stay home to climb the walls with you. / We walk the ceiling / tripping in the door frames / stepping around lights. Reading this book feels like we’re in a world that is both familiar and new, made so by the magic of language and love.

—Laura Read, author of But She Is Also Jane

About the Author

Originally from Minnesota, LeAnn Bjerken holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University. A former journalist, freelance writer and mermaid performer, she has temporarily traded her fins for legs in order to better keep up with her daughter. Her poetry has appeared in Miracle Magazine, The Pacific Northwest Inlander, Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living Magazine, and online publications including Devilfish Review, The Artistic Muse, The Lake, Fox Adoption Magazine, and Plants & Poetry Journal. When not out seeking inspiration, she can be found at home snuggling with her husband Steve, daughter Eowyn, and cat Tikki.

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The Beautiful One’s Ark

by Sher A. Schwartz

A lyric collection of poetry exploring contemporary rural/agrarian life in Eastern Oregon. These poems are rooted in place and season. They explore loss, change, transformation, and inter-species sharing. Celebrating sound and expressing a variety of poetic forms, Schwartz’s poems reveal the poet’s life with hunting dogs, donkeys, birds, and the ever-changing environment.

BONUS: Each printed book will include a QR-Code for access to enjoy recordings of Sher reading select poems from the collection. 

Enjoy a Video of Sher reading from the book:

Early Praise for The Beautiful One’s Ark:

Eastern Oregon is a region often over-looked by the rest of the state, its austere, dramatic terrain far removed from the easy green world to the west. Schwartz stands as its advocate and caregiver. Here is a poet who has clearly taken the time to attend to the living world around her, its prairie and drylands, wide-open horizon and wild creatures. This is a collection written with musical lyricism by someone who understands that healing the land heals us as well.

—Caroline Boutard, author of Each Leaf Singing

From her 200-acre rewilding project near the Columbia River comes the bountiful inspiration for Schwartz’s first collection. The poetry is filled with transformations, of myth, of landscape, of species, relationships, and between the domestic and the wild.

The poet has an eye for the illuminating detail, which she sets to a music all her own, “the lower meadow/ sober purple oboe/ sprays hoarfrost solos,” and in the persona poem, “Wolf Eye,” “we lock eye to eye/ The dog, the girl/ Her brown eye, my golden/ Twining curls and silver tipped fur/ But, I burn…”

She sings of an altered climate’s collision with the world she cherishes and has nurtured. The collection holds a graceful, often witty, call for humans to realize their interconnectedness with nature, all of us sharing space on this fragile ark.

—Kim Hamilton, author of Calling Through Water and Visitation

Every reader will want to be aboard The Beautiful One’s Ark as Noah’s wife saves a drowning dragonfly. This whole collection constitutes a love song to the writer’s husband, their farm, and all the animals on that farm – including some they don’t want. Sher Schwartz celebrates dancing donkeys, dogs in the bed, even the mouse in the outhouse and the feline perpetrator of pigeon murder. Praise be to the country life and a poet who so gracefully puts it into words.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Waving Fly Swatters at Angels

About the Author

Sher A. Schwartz is a published essayist, poet, old time fiddle musician, singer, and retired professor. She was born in Georgia, raised in Virginia, and spent many summers in rural West Virginia with her mother’s family. Her vocal training, beginning at twelve, and later rhythm guitar playing in an old-time string band laid the foundation for the musicality in Schwartz’s poetry. Schwartz has written country and mountain folk songs and composed classical hymns. She lived for many years in a cabin on the beach in Alaska while teaching in the humanities department at the University of Alaska in Ketchikan. Her band Red Hoochie and the Tomcods played at festivals and events around Southeast Alaska.

In 2011, she retired from academic life and moved to Eastern Oregon, where she’s trained and competed with her hunting dogs, and helped restore two hundred acres on an old farm to native grasslands and pollinator plants. Schwartz has continued to perform with the old-timey Sugar Hill Band throughout the Columbia River Gorge though she writes more poetry these days than songs and essays.

You can hear Sher Schwartz voice poems from many different poets, including her own, at her website: sherpoetry.com

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by Penelope Scambly Schott

These delightful and conversational poems explore the concept of gOD, with a sense of humor, a childlike wonder, a reverence for the natural world, and a look in the mirror.

Enjoy a Video of Penelope Reading from the Book:

Penelope Scambly Schott — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2024)

Early Praise for gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament:

Penelope Scambly Schott has captured a marvelously witty glimpse of the divinity that resides within us all: a self-awareness creating universes and loving every tiniest bit, laughing and crying over our human foibles and destructive tendencies. With brilliant use of poetic form and license, the author invites us to really examine our understanding of the Source of all and the consequences of our own actions. This is a must-read for anyone who is at one of those points of asking, “What’s it all about, anyway?”

—Reverend Dr. Ruth L. Miller, author of Unveiling your Hidden Power and Uncommon Prayer

Penelope Scambly Schott spins out a powerful picture of the Deity in gOD: A respectfully Divergent Testament. The “whole other” mystery who creates the universe turns out to be totally relatable, showing up in a series of conversational poems, revealing a deep caring about all of creation and its creatures. Schott’s testimony is indeed respectful and not so divergent that I can’t give it my own respectful “Amen!”

—Karl Vercouteren, United Church of Christ pastor, retired

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott lives in the small town of Dufur, Oregon (population: 635). She has published several books of poems and is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Penelope was raised to believe that every religion is a folk custom and that each one should be respected. Her own faith practice is climbing Dufur hill where, from the top on clear days, she can see five mountains. She and the dog do this daily; on Sundays her husband accompanies them.

Previous chapbooks published by The Poetry Box include Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman and November Quilt.

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by Emily-Sue Sloane

These poems are a meditation on the myriad divisions and inequities we face, both personally and as a society. In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, award-winning poet Emily-Sue Sloane pulls on many of the fraying threads that divide us and gently weaves them with striking imagery to inspire connections through hope and, at times, humor.

Enjoy a Video of Emily-Sue Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Disconnects and Other Broken Threads:

In Emily-Sue Sloane’s powerful new chapbook, Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, the poems’ directness about suffering, loss and injustice tears at our hearts and asks us to recognize what needs healing or that we must grieve bravely what may never be healed. Sloane sees, feels and speaks with honesty that will not accept the glib comfort of pretense. In “A Daughter’s Question,” she says of the speaker’s mother: She never said / and I never thought to ask / until it was too late / what made her so angry. The poem reaches out with a broken heart. It asks us to open ours. Sloane suggests again and again, with rage, regret, humor, irony and anger: This is what it takes to be alive.

—Scudder Parker, poet and author of Safe as Lightning

Reading these poems is like microdosing on the big, unwieldy emotions we may struggle to put into words late at night around a campfire, looking up at the stars. Like a gardener cultivating a bonsai tree, Emily-Sue Sloane takes big, wild concepts like mortality, impotent rage, grief and regret and presents them to us as stark small snapshots of everyday life. The overwhelming world pulls back a little as these words gently take our hands and say, I know. I know. Me too.

—Rorie Kelly, singer/songwriter, Shadow Work (album)

In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, Emily-Sue Sloane protests the ills of society which destroy people and ideals, the personal failings which lead to broken lives and the eternal human lament upon the death of beloved persons. Indignant of social injustices, she deconstructs the makeup of contemporary life, giving a thundering voice to the voiceless (“Hollow-Eyed Hunger,” “Freedom Canceled,” “Undone”).

In spite of the wonderfully tantalizing title, the poet weaves subtle hidden connections—how wonderful or ironic that in this chapbook’s very first poem, “Hard-Wood Wisdom,” the lyric voice is that of an oak tree’s bark speaking in first person. The connection is unmistakable. Compassion, love, ideals and dreams underlie the brokenness. Throughout, the reader will encounter and enjoy the music traditionally associated with poetry, but all too often absent today—alliteration, assonance, rhythm: Time shreds memories / into random wisps, / seaweed swept ashore / only to be snatched / back by rapacious tides.

—Tonia Leon, bilingual poet and translator,
author of My Beloved Chaos and Slow-Cooked Poetry/Poesia a fuego

About the Author

Emily-Sue Sloane is an award-winning poet who published her first full-length collection, We Are Beach Glass, in 2022. She has won first-place awards from Calling All Writers, the Long Island Fair, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society, Performance Poets Association and Princess Ronkonkoma Productions. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Amethyst Review, The Avocet, Bards Against Hunger, Boston Literary Magazine, Corona, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Long Island Sounds Anthology, Mobius Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society Review, Panoplyzine, The Poeming Pigeon, PoetryBay, The RavensPerch and Shot Glass Journal. Sloane holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College and lives in Huntington Station, NY, with her wife, singer-songwriter Linda Sussman. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, yoga and exploring her native Long Island’s natural beauty.

Learn more at https://EmilySueSloane.com.

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by Richard Jordan

First Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2023

The poems in The Squannacook at Dawn range from formal verse to free verse to prose poetry and are linked by the speaker’s experiences with water. While many of the poems revolve around fishing, they also explore the speaker’s relationship with the loss of his father, the peace of the natural world, aging, environmental change, and spirituality.

Enjoy a Video of Richard Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for The Squannacook at Dawn:

Each of the twenty poems that comprise The Squannacook at Dawn is so well crafted that the art is all readers experience, the craft a scaffolding that has been removed. Each poem begins with a sense of welcome and closes unpredictably, yet inevitably (i.e., no better ending seems possible). This is high praise, but it’s not my only reason for selecting this manuscript as winner of  The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize for 2023. Read together and in the order they appear in the collection, these twenty poems create what feels like a twenty-first poem: the chapbook itself. The poet has not only written twenty fine poems—none an imitation of another in content or form—but when read straight through, the poems provide readers with a tightly woven and beautiful verbal tapestry, each poem contributing indelibly to the chapbook’s larger context or story.

—Andrea Hollander, contest judge and author of And Now, Nowhere but Here

The art of poetry and the art of fishing come together in these deeply felt, beautifully observed poems. The attentiveness to word and cadence speaks to and for all that the poet notices, be it river currents or dragonflies or ospreys. The earth and the waters are also very much speaking, and Richard Jordan has listened carefully. The scenarios vary as they reflect the amplitude of memorable occasions, but the aim is true in poem after poem—a sense of gratitude to be in the undiminished splendor that is out-of-doors.

—Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel and former Poet Laureate of Maine

The Squannacook at Dawn is the perfect antidote to an age of human beings anxiously awaiting the next ping of their cell phones. If you’ve ever wondered where fly fishers get their patience and why they don’t get bored, the answer is clear in this vivid, wise collection. It’s in poet Richard Jordan’s dad, an iridescent scale glued to his thumb/ glinting in the April morning sun. These poems, some of them gently formal, others prose poems, dissolve the work week in the natural world’s healing magic: egrets, otters, and of course, rainbow trout. Even Jesus prefers the river to the church here—not just for baptism but for beauty and peace. Jordan is at his best observing the specific: loosestrife, cognac pipe tobacco, Macoun apples, the “jug-o-rum” croak of a bullfrog, mist. Even if your dad never taught you how to tie a fly, you need to spend some time in the shade near the water with a copy of The Squannacook at Dawn.

—Christine Potter, author of Unforgetting and Sheltering in Place.

In The Squannacook at Dawn, Richard Jordan uses close observation of nature, strong memories, and exquisite language to evoke the holiness of fishing. He pulls the reader in with precise details such as in the poem, “Night Fishing with Otters,” where he describes five young otters at the edge of sedge and bulrush and the mother otter with a hefty, flapping catfish plucked/ from the mud. Whether he’s delineating moments spent fishing with his father, witnessing old men talking, or remembering a house that once stood by a creek, he leads the reader to feel at home in nature, to appreciate the fleeting beauty of the world.

—Judy Kaber, author of Renaming the Seasons and former Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine

About the Author

A Ph.D. mathematician by training and data scientist by vocation, Richard Jordan has been an avid reader of poetry for almost as long as he can remember and has been writing poetry for twenty years. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Tar River Poetry, Rattle (finalist for the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize), Little Patuxent Review, Sugar House Review, New York Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Rappahannock Review and Valparaiso Poetry Review. When not doing math or reading & writing poetry, he is most likely at a river or lake somewhere casting away. He resides in Littleton, Massachusetts, a short drive from the Squannacook River.

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by Cathy Cain

Like prism light, Cathy Cain’s poems in A Shape of Sky reveal, in distinct colors, the predicament and magic of living in our bodies. Cain, a visual artist as well as a writer, illuminates complexity, beauty, and exuberant sensuousness wherever she directs her gaze. Whether she focuses on the work of artists like David Hockney, James Turrell, Kiki Smith, the process of making art, or merely the everyday, her poetry reminds us that an aesthetic view can sustain us with energy and hope.

About the Author

Poet and visual artist Cathy Cain is the author of Bee Dance (The Poetry Box, 2019) and Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry; the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry; and First Place, Second Place, and Honorable Mentions from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Verseweavers, and VoiceCatcher.

Cain is a two-year Poet’s Studio alumna and a 2014-2015 Atheneum Fellow, both at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, she has studied with Portland’s Mountain Writers Series and with visiting poets through Literary Arts.

She holds degrees in literature and visual art from Lewis & Clark College, MAT; Oregon State University, BFA; and University of Washington, BA, Phi Beta Kappa.

Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She is the lucky wife of a sweet man, and the mother of two fine sons. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

Early Praise for A Shape of Sky:

Cathy Cain’s poems are balanced between the light and darkness of what is said and unsaid, of what decays and what blossoms. Her wonderful book tends to the margins of existence with a steady eye. Time and again, the poems in A Shape of Sky are like maps to guide us through the transformations that can come from perspective, resilience, and wonder.

—David Biespiel, author of A Place of Exodus

What strikes me about [the poem] “Overlap” is how carefully it examines the seemingly mundane. The allusions are poignant while still leaving the objects and the tiny clashes between them to speak for themselves.

—David Perez, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Santa Clara County, CA, and author, Love in a Time of Robot Apocalypse

The experience of reading Cathy Cain’s A Shape of Sky is akin to walking through an art museum, if all the paintings were rendered in words. In language that is lyrical, sensual, and brave, Cain expertly braids experiences of the natural world, the body, the mythic and spiritual, and the creation and contemplation of art into poems that radiate both light and darkness. At times, the words themselves seemed to lift off the page and hover before me, illuminated. In this astonishing collection, Cain creates for the reader “a delicate descending/ from heavy dream into uncluttered light.”

—Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters

ENJOY CATHY READING FROM HER NEW BOOK:

CATHY CAIN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2021)

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by Doug Stone

Here, Doug Stone, a fourth generation Oregonian, shares his love of Oregon—its places, its seasons, and its people. Through his lyrical and narrative poems, we are led to witness the power of place, the bonds of family, and his tributes to favorite artist and poets—all through the lens of the ubiquitous northwest rain.

About the Author

Doug Stone is a fourth generation Oregonian and lives with his wife amid hop yards and vineyards near the Willamette River in Benton County, Oregon.  In past lives he has worked on a county road crew, been a grocery store clerk, a case worker, and an analyst and a consultant on public policy issues to state governments, AARP, and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice.

He has won the Oregon Poetry Association’s Poet Choice Award.  His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.  He has written two collections of poetry, The Season of Distress and Clarity, and The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water.

Early Praise for Sitting in Powell’s…:

“Here the rain tells the truth about everything it touches.” Combine elegiac Oregon rain with the spareness of Tang dynasty poets, and you get the honest lyricism of Doug Stone where the joy of swallows can write in the sky that “poetry may not save the world/ but reminds me/ the world is worth saving.” And please don’t miss the magnificent tribute to artist Rick Bartow.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author
A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth
(Oregon Book Award) and Lovesong for Dufur

Doug Stone’s collection of poems, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain, is an anthem to Oregon where the author has lived a long and intensely observant life. In addition to immersing the reader in a celebration of nature, Stone also mourns the human interventions such as dams which have lobotomized those ancient voices—the sound of Celilo Falls. He grabs the reader by the collar with “The Wilson River Road”—a nasty stretch of asphalt,/ especially at night, shouldering through the mountains/ like a mean drunk staggering toward the coast. Frequently, his landscape or aspects of the weather take on an unexpected agency: the January sun troubles down/ the left margin of the sky like a misspelled word,/ neither warm nor bright, just wrong (“The Power of Place”). Or, from “Summer Heat on the High Desert:” All day the great animal of heat paces back and forth . . . his sides rise and fall with the twitching breeze . . . And sometimes it is an animal, in another place,/ more dog than he’s been in weeks,/ so complete in his rancid aura,/ oblivious to any human . . . (“Dog Days”). Stone does not flinch from melancholy but also makes room for humor—see “To the Barista at Starbucks Who Told Me Carmel Macchiato Isn’t the Heroine in Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Finally, Stone honors the Masters: Ursula K Le Guin, Rick Bartow, Peter Sears, and through ekphrasis, George Rouault and Marc Chagall, Jan Pienkowski and Leonardo Da Vinci, and, perhaps closest to his heart, an epistolary homage to Du Fu and Li Bai.

 —Rachel Barton, editor, Willawaw Journal

There is pain and there is splendor in these poems, and Doug Stone knows that the task of the poet to study and transform their meeting places. In Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain, he has succeeded admirably. Here is a poet who writes in spare, direct language to set real life in motion.

—David Biespiel, Poet-in-Residence, Oregon State University,
author, A Long High Whistle (Oregon Book Award) & Republic Café

Enjoy Doug Reading from His New Book:

Doug Stone — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2020)

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Poems by Tricia Knoll

Tricia Knoll is a widely published Oregon poet. Each year she farmsits at Broadfork Farm, a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington. These poems herald her love of gardening, her compassion for the fur-covered and feather-clad beings that find the farm to be home.

In a bucolic setting next to the rushing Salmon River and below the glaciers of Mt. Adams, her record of life on the farm affirms both the humor and zest of living as well as the realization that the lives of farm animals are also witness to impermanence. At a time of environmental change, Knoll’s poetry weighs the role of the small family-owned farm against the brutal realities of the world beyond the farm. She finds gratitude and stillness in the simple gifts of sun, wind, water, and soil.

This poetry, compiled over seven years, represented for me love songs to a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington where I regularly farmsit. I wanted to release the book to poetry-lovers who admire the hard work of single-family organic farming and who have soft feelings for animals that live on farms. My daughter was married on this farm. We had plenty of photos that my husband, Darrell Salk, had taken over the years — so we incorporated some of the photos mixed in with the poetry.

—Tricia Knoll

About the Author

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet. To her, the Columbia River Gorge is one of the great wonders of the world. She loves crossing the bridge at Hood River, Oregon and heading north to Trout Lake, to Broadfork Farm. For many years, some of her best friends have been creatures with fur or more than two feet.

Her education focused on literature – degrees from Stanford University (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A.T.) She has taught high school English, edited a newspaper for school-age children, worked as the Public Relations Director at Portland’s Children Museum, and retired as the Public Information Officer at the Portland

Her first day of retirement began with walking a dog and sitting to reread Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. That re-ignited her lifelong love of writing and reading poetry. She maintains a daily haiku writing practice and sometimes calls herself an eco-poet. Her poetry appears widely in national and international journals and anthologies.

Her chapbook Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press, 2014) explores interactions between humans and wildlife in urban habitat. Her book, Ocean’s Laughter (Aldrich Press, 2016) takes its title from a line of Pablo Neruda’s: Do you not also fear the ocean’s laughter? Poetry in Ocean’s Laughter focuses on change over time in Manzanita, a small town on Oregon’s north coast.

Knoll is extremely grateful for the poet-mentors she has studied with and her poet-friends who continue to inspire and encourage her.

What They’re Saying…

At a glance, Broadfork Farm might seem a rustic homage to a simpler sort of life — and it is that — but the poems are rich with energies, convergences with and retreats from our cultural moment. Subtly, the poems ask to engage with the realities of the farm — the violences of barnyard cats and dogs, the slaughter of lambs, the impact of a long drought — and to hold these in comparison and contrast with the banal forces of history: the brutal conquests of Native lands, terror attacks at home and abroad, a hate crime against a Buddhist monk “mistaken” for a Muslim.

Knoll is a skilled poet; “To Tuck in Barnyard Creatures” is one of many poems with a rich sonic texture that is both subtle and celebratory — sometimes it feels as if we’re in the music of the farm, the songs of the roosters, the barking of the dogs, the rhythms of a different life. By the end of the book, we are asked, perhaps, not only to see and hear “life on the farm” but to see and hear our own lives a little differently. To put it more simply, like its namesake, the poetry of Broadfork Farm will “feed a few and teach caring” — and that’s a tremendous accomplishment for a book of poems.

—Tod Marshall,
Washington State Poet Laureate

For Tricia Knoll, writing poems is a way of participating in the everyday of what matters. While Broadfork Farm traces Knoll’s experiences in the daily business and busyness at the eponymous farm, her articulate and carefully observant poems simultaneously present evidence of her deep ecological concerns and her compassionate embrace of our world and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Open this book anywhere and feel the “rustles and wingbeats” of the wind on the farm, as well as Knoll’s abundant gratitude for “what watches over.”

—Andrea Hollander,
Author of Landscape with Female Figure:
New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012

To read Tricia Knoll’s Broadfork Farm is to come to a gate and find that it opens for you. These aren’t poems that stand and talk stiffly at the threshold; these are poems that welcome you into the farm and barn and pastures, poems that walk and work, that see, taste, and listen to this particular loved place. Knoll’s poems inhabit the farm as vividly as the community of humans, spotted pigs, broody chickens, goats, and dogs that live there. They roost and burrow and take root. I find myself not so much reading these poems as sticking my head into each one like a bee in a flower, eager to see what is inside. I want to stay a long time in this book’s marvelous pasture.

—Annie Lighthart,
Author of Iron String

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Poems by Lynn M. Knapp

Giving Ground pulses with traffic and teems with life, leading us through tangled streets, intertwined lives. We find a place of overgrown gardens, alleys in bloom, pheasants in flight, rabbits, stray cats, and Spanish love songs, a place where the ordinary appears in an extraordinary light. With deft narrative strokes, Giving Ground reveals a place and its people, lives balanced on the shifting ground of language and culture. Like the place, Lynn Knapp’s poems are wry, real, and poignant.

About the Author

Lynn M. Knapp is a poet, memoirist, teacher, and musician. She lives in a hundred-year-old house and walks every day in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest. The grit, grime, and unexpected beauty of the central city inspire her life and her writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss (2014), Poeming Pigeons and The Lost River Review (2015). Her work also appears online at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington.

What They’re Saying…

Giving Ground inhabits a world of concrete and blossoms, margins where cultures meet and languages strive to make sense of one another. Author Lynn Knapp displays gentle humor and the heartfelt urge to understand, to cross the border of difference in a neighborhood of alleys, music, chain link fences, and “sunlit grass the morning after.”

 – Linda Andrews,
Author of Escape of the Bird Women

Giving Ground is an invitation to be part of the neighborhood. In these narrative poems, Lynn Knapp observes the natural (flora & fauna) and human relationships happening around her. Accessible and engaging, these poems make us feel as if we are standing on the porch looking out into the small town where robins and finches forage together and a yard full of friends laugh. Walk down the path with the poet and meet the world taking place around you.

– Kelli Russell Agodon,
Author of Hourglass Museum & The Daily Poet

In Lynn Knapp’s new collection Giving Ground, myriad forms of life abound–animals, plants, flowers, and immigrants–transplants from Mexico. Vivid natural imagery becomes the backdrop for a unique set of characters who fight for survival, alternately shocking and amusing the reader. Yet there’s a rare tenderness apparent in this small-town world, a place where food, music, and language come from a foreign land but are assimilated without question, perhaps because there is never the luxury of a choice.

— Judith Skillman,
Author of Storm,
Winner of Eric Mathieu King Fund Award

In Giving Ground, Lynn Knapp explores the interstices of the controlled and the wild in her garden and her neighborhood. The nature trail near her house is bordered by railroad tracks and a highway, is populated by half-domestic rabbits, descendants of a runaway pet, and homeless campers. Knapp pulls weeds from her own garden and finds flowers blooming in an abandoned one, observes her neighbors from the vantage of windows, alleys, and the passage of time. We sense a desire to close those gaps between herself and those around her, to no longer be la gabacha in her neighborhood, but to pull her friends and neighbors–and their joys and traditions–into full citizenship in her world.

— Teri Zipf,
Author of Outside the School of Theology,
William Stafford Memorial Award in Poetry

Combining deft portraits of both past and current inhabitants with lyrical nature poems, Knapp reflects the demographic shifts that define American history. The house that a German great-grandpa built becomes a casa painted aqua blue. Now “pale pretenders” who shout “at their children in English … not the smooth, dulce syrup of Spanish” have arrived. The ground keeps giving way – and this sharp-eyed, talented poet captures that unchanging truth in a moving, finely-crafted collection.

— Carolyn Martin,
Author of The Way a Woman Knows

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