Tess Gallagher

The long-awaited and resplendent new poetry collection by Tess Gallagher, whose poems "are a gift of a poet's heart and soul to her readers" (Robert Coles) Don't sharpen them. Expectation, more dangerous than any blade. —"Knives in the Borrowed House" Fourteen years after Moon Crossing Bridge—Tess Gallagher's powerful elegies for her husband, Raymond Carver—Dear Ghosts, is the return of Gallagher's unequivocal voice. In these new poems, the ghosts of the past are conjured as part of the present day: the deceased beloved, the father long dead, the ailing mother, the victims of holocaust and war. With these spirits beside her, Gallagher confronts her own illness and mortality, and celebrates love and friendship in these spare lyrics and muscular narratives, each punctuated by her resilience and grace. Here is the new work by one of America's most accomplished poets.

Poems

Dear Ghosts,

Playful, serious and sassy poems about kisses by one of America's leading poets.

Portable Kisses

New and Selected Poems

Amplitude

Is, Is Not

Erin Malone

Richard Fifield

Rick Barot

Kathryn Smith

David Naimon

Catherine Johnson

Kate Lebo

Nicola Griffith

Joe Wilkins

Elissa Washuta

Beth Piatote

Leyna Krow

Tiffany Midge

Alexis M. Smith

Shawn Vestal

Johanna Stoberock

Kate Peterson

Katrina Roberts

Kathryn Nuernberger

Lucia Perillo

Margot Kahn

Taneum Bambrick

David Allan Cates

Erin Pringle

Nance Van Winckel

Linda Cooper

Ruth Joffre

J. Newell

Anca L. Szilágyi

Rena Priest

Tara Roberts

Leah Sottile

Dayna Patterson

Gary Copeland Lilley

CMarie Fuhrman

Dujie Tahat

Elissa Ball

Alexander Ortega

Ellen Welcker

Mita Mahato

Jennifer Marsh

Emma Noyes

Tamara Love

Katharine Whitcomb

Dawn Pichón Barron

Shantell Jackson

Laura Read

Rachel Mehl

Derek Annis

Christopher Maccini

Seanse Ducken

Tim Greenup

Henrietta Goodman

Inga Laurent

In this rich, shadowy, glittering anthology edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller , a multitude of Northwest writers share their singular stories, essays, and poems that center what Shields calls "the literature of despair." These pages confront what is difficult in life with extraordinary precision and grace: In Beth Piatote's story "Secondary Infection," a Yakama auntie narrates the undoing of a lonely woman; in the essay "There Is No Story Until It Happens to You," Richard Fifield writes about a devastating car crash in the remote Montana northlands of his youth; in his series of poems, "During the Pandemic," Rick Barot reflects on fear, isolation, and hope as quarantine descends; in her visual poem, "The Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit: An Auto-Elegy," artist Mita Mahato mourns the decline of a fragile species and the terrors of human impact on the environment. In works that span themes from colonialism to environmentalism, from divorce to disease, from toxic masculinity to a loss of faith, the writers here unflinchingly address what makes us vulnerable, what makes us complex, what cleaves us and what connects us. As Zeller writes in the book's introduction, this ambitious anthology pushes us to "learn, memorize, and recite the songs sung by these regional voices, mapping us into a communal root system of evergreen selves."

Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest

Evergreen

Josie Gray

A collection of short stories by Josie Gray and Tess Gallagher.

Barnacle Soup, and Other Stories from the West of Ireland

Under Stars

Tess Gallagher is one of America's leading poets. In Midnight Lantern she collects her indispensable work from forty years of writing poetry, along with an ample new section written in the west of Ireland. Included in this generous book are Gallagher's signature nocturnes - for the changing Pacific Northwest, for her tough childhood, and for her late husband, Raymond Carver, and others. Her challenging new work confronts a tumultuous century's worth of art, warfare, and illness, while certifying the stubborn resilience of poetry and love. Astonishing, insightful, mischievous, an inimitable 'seeing-into experience', Midnight Lantern is the essential book by a poet in the prime of her power. 'Gallagher's poems resound with exquisite beauty and remind me once more how it is not subject but its rendering that redeems and uplifts' - Boston Globe 'Tess Gallagher's is perhaps the most deeply moving and spiritual and intensely intelligent poetry being written in America today' - William Heyen 'It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerising rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images' - Joyce Carol Oates 'She is outstanding among her contemporaries in the naturalness of her inflection, the fine excess of her spirit, and the energy of her dramatic imagination' - Stanley Kunitz

New & Selected Poems

Midnight Lantern

The talented widow of celebrated poet Raymond Carver shares her own resonant verses, the writing of which helped her to come to terms with the loss of her husband.

Poetry

Moon Crossing Bridge

Raymond Carver

Ann Beattie

Bob Adelman

A poignant portrait of the landscapes and people that would greatly influence Raymond Carver s writing."

The World of Raymond Carver

Carver Country

new & selected poems

Midnight lantern

3 Poems from Instruction to the Double

Featuring excerpts from the collections, The Lover of Horses and At the Owl Woman Saloon, a volume set primarily in the author's native Pacific northwest features the stories of loggers, bear wrestlers, horse whisperers, and other everyday protagonists. Original.

Selected Stories

The Man from Kinvara

Interviews with Northwest Writers: Tess Gallagher

My Black Horse

Instructions to the Double

I've always been fascinated by Tess Gallagher's poetry. In Portable Kisses, she convincingly provides condensed librettos of lovers' patterns of approach and retreat. The poems sometimes have a mythic quality, while at other times the poet all but steps aside to wink at us and to acknowledge the power of mind over matter as it intrudes itself into even the most romantic myths. It's a book filled with beauty, energy, and surprise. --Ann Beattie.

Love Poems

Gallagher writes of contemporary poets and of the influences on her poetry

Essays on Poetry

A Concert of Tenses

Jeffrey Skinner

Combining selections from three previous works with new poems, this volume reveals changes in the poet's style, tone, and perspective. In the early poems, clear and uncluttered speech is a deft anchor for a willingness to admit secrets from the invisible underside of events from her working class childhood. Gradually, the glint of absurdity or magic, the droll tunes of the plot, the pressure of concrete reality are overshadowed by concerns about the poet's role in social and political realities. The later poems include a new theme--political concerns and their relationship to the personal life--and a new tone revealing tenderness, acceptance, and celebration. ISBN 1-55597-099-0: $16.00.

Tess Gallagher’s new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and hovers daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Tess Gallagher’s poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop. Guided by humor, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests—the Northwest of America, the Northwest of Ireland, and a West even further to the edge, beyond the physical. These landscapes are charged with invisible energies and inhabited by the people, living and dead, who shape Gallagher’s poems and life. Restorative in every sense, Is, Is Not is the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write—a book of the spirit made manifest by the poet’s unrelenting gaze and her intimate engagement with the mysteries that keep us reaching.

Tess Gallagher

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