Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Poetry

Fall 2018

Two river poems

Washington State University landscape architecture professor and poet Jolie Kaytes reflects on the complex emotions and rational considerations about the Columbia River watershed through poems that give new ways to consider our part in the stories of the River.

 

Fishhook Park

A tongue stopping “f”

with a soft “ish,”

tied to a tight lipped “h”

caught on “ook.”

Hard to swallow.

Where the Palouse Band gathered,

homed their family bones

now buried by the Snake River’s

stopped up waters, slow and dumb.

Book - Briefly Noted
Winter 2016

Briefly noted

 

Light in the Trees

Gail Folkins ’85

Texas Tech University Press: 2016 

Folkins draws on her experiences growing up in rural western Washington to weave a coming of age tale for both the narrator and the place. The memoir, touching on everything from serial killers and Northwest volcanoes to Sasquatch myths and runaway livestock, glides through past and present while exploring cultural and environmental topics illustrating the changing American West.

 

The Expanding Universe: A Primer on Relativistic Cosmology

William D. Heacox ’72 MA

Cambridge University Press: 2015

Cosmology, the science of the universe, has seen a renaissance in recent decades. This textbook by … » More …

Spring 2011

HaiCoug

A haiku contest with a WSU theme

Winners of the 2011 contest!

CONGRATULATIONS to the winners of the first Washington State Magazine HaiCoug contest, featuring haiku poems with a WSU theme. After reviewing almost 100 entries, we chose first, second, and third place HaiCougs based on how they evoked the WSU experience, followed the haiku structure, and presented a clever or thought provoking twist.

First place goes to Susan Picatti ’74 from Seattle. She wins a gift package from the Bookie.

Two day old Evie
In Dad’s arms; Cougs beat Huskies
The perfect first game.

The second place winner, Susy (Roark) … » More …

The Long Place cover
Spring 2016

The Long Place

The Long Place cover

Luis Montaño ’76 MFA

Ocote Press: 2015

Spokane artist Luis Montaño’s book of poetry, 50 years in the making, dips deep into his childhood in New Mexico and tells autobiographical and allegorical stories of the wide landscape, grizzled veterans, and a favorite diner hangout with friends.

Montaño worked for many years as a ceramic artist and jewelry designer, as well as teaching at Eastern Washington University, after graduating from WSU. As he … » More …

Fall 2015

Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way

 

Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way cover

Linda Russo

Shearsman Books: 2015

Linda Russo translates the environmental characteristics of the Palouse from scenery to words in this slender volume of her poetry. The cohabitation between humans and nature is explored everywhere from a home garden to the vast wheat fields. Her other poems delve into post-pastoral themes of consumer development on farmable land:

shopping centers and cheap food production

the song of arable, or … » More …

On this borrowed bike cover
Spring 2015

On This Borrowed Bike

On This Borrowed Bike

 

Lisa Panepinto ’05

Three Rooms Press, 2014

 

Rivers flow through the poems in Panepinto’s slim volume. They whisper of the Northwest, of young people who have jumped in, of silvery fish and poison in the water. In her first collection, the Spokane native writes with a deft lyricism and of a sense of place in poems like “river metallic as veins of saints”:

“the land creates
its inhabitants
here I am low
down bog like”

Her other poems speak of Spokane and rural roads, and music festivals and blues … » More …

New and Noteworthy
Winter 2014

New & noteworthy

 

After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness

David J. Leonard

SUNY Press, 2012

After a brawl at a Pistons-Pacers game in 2004, the NBA adopted policies to govern black players and prevent them from embracing styles and personas associated with blackness. This book by Leonard, associate professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University, discloses connections between the NBA’s discourse and the broader discourse of anti-black racism.

 

Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages

Timothy A. Kohler (editor), Mark D. Varien (editor)

University of California Press, 2012

This book examines how climate change, population size, interpersonal conflict, resource … » More …

Kathleen Flenniken
Spring 2014

On the road

Washington’s Poet Laureate brings poetry to, and discovers it in, each of the state’s 39 counties

Although my parents lived in the same house in Richland, Washington—my hometown—for 50 years, they never stopped being proud, relentless Oregonians. But in 1989 Mother and Dad celebrated Washington’s centenary in a big way. They dreamed up one of those projects that makes sense to retired couples but bemuses their children: visiting and photographing all 39 Washington county courthouses. They were even written up in the Tri-City Herald for achieving their goal, and photographed paging through their album. A family friend rediscovered the newspaper clipping more than twenty years … » More …

Love Reports to Spring Training cover
Fall 2013

Love Reports to Spring Training

Love Reports to Spring Training cover

Linda Kittell

Turning Point Books, 2013

 

Baseball lends itself as metaphor like no other sport. Boxing might come close, but its inherent brutality and changing cultural tastes have removed it from the public’s awareness.

But baseball endures and permeates our culture, and even a non-fan can appreciate the sport’s dramatic interplay of quietude and adrenaline. In Love Reports to Spring Training, Linda Kittell exploits this richness through a deeply satisfying … » More …

Summer 2013

We Are the Bus

Bus

 

James McKean ’68, ’74
Texas Review Press, 2012

This small book of poetry plays on themes of reminiscence, travel, and the bliss of simple things like being a boy with a Racket Box full of fireworks. This collection of 42 poems won the 2011 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.

In it McKean transports us to some lovely places. Fishing on the Sandy River, climbing up to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, floating on … » More …