This month Of Interest celebrates National Poetry Month by featuring select holdings from particular independent booksellers and publishers that provide a healthy offering of poetry.
First up, we pair a couple of Seattle’s finest – the bookshop closest to my heart and my alma mater, Wessel & Lieberman, and one of the leading publishers of poetry, Wave Books.
Enjoy!
Paul Celan. Wolf’s Bean / Wolfsbohne. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Delos Press / William Drenttel, 1997. One of fifty numbered copies signed by the translator. $100.
Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Winner of the National Book Award. $45.00
Ezra Pound, Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: A New Directions Reprint, ca. 1956. $25
Li Chang-ji. Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons. The Collected Poems of Li He (Li Chang-ji, 790-816). San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983. $35
Charles Bukowski, A Visitor Complains of My Disenfranchise. Los Angeles: Illuminati, 1987. Published in an edition of 225 copies; single-signature, stitched, and pasted into stiff paper over boards, which have a brass ‘button’ and ‘nut’ combined to represent a ‘doorknob.’ $150
Edgar A. Poe, Poems. East Aurora, NY: Done into a printed book by the Roycrofters, 1901. One of one hundred numbered copies printed on Imperial Japan Vellum, signed by Elbert Hubbard. $600
Robert Hass, Praise. New York: The Ecco Press, 1979. Brief presentation inscription from the author on the half-title page. Poet’s second book. $150.
Lorine Niedecker, North Central. London: Fulcrum Press, 1968. One of one hundred signed and numbered copies. $600.
Paul Auster and Mitchell Sisskind, editors. Living Hand 1. Paris, France and Chicago: Living Hand, 1973. $40.
The first issue of this journal issued jointly by Auster & Sisskind; contributors include Paul Celan, Lydia Davis, John Taylor, Georges Bataille, Edmond Jabès, Allen Mandelbaum and Joan Mitchell (cover art).
Allen Ginsberg, Illuminated Poems. With paintings and drawings by Eric Drooker. New York & London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996. $40.
Broadsides
Charles Baudelaire, The Abyss (Le gouffre) Portland, Oregon: Charles Seluzicki, 2001. $200
Dorianne Laux, Savages [Broadside]. Salem, Oregon: Salem Public Library, 2012.
One of one hundred numbered copies, signed by the poet. Published as part of an exhibit celebrating the poems of Carl Adamshick, Matthew Dickman, Michael Dickman, and Michael McGriff held at Salem Public Library, Oregon, April 2012.
Amber Coverdale Sumrall, Moon Holding Water. Scantron Press, 2009. Signed by the printer and numbered ‘5’ of an edition of 16. $200
Duane Niatum, Earth Vowels. Seattle: Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers, 2006. $150.
Illustrated engraving by Makah artist Greg Colfax. One of 125 signed and numbered copies printed, signed by author and illustrator.
Kim Addonizio, Another Day on Earth. New York: The Center for Book Arts, 2009. $100
Designed and printed by Delphi Basilicato on masa paper with a waxed Ururyu decorated overwrap. Both rolled and set in a printed vellum sleeve. One of 100 signed and numbered copies. // A series of four poems, “Storm Catechism,” “Half-Blind Elegy,” “November 11: 2004,” and “Another Day on Earth: Tsunami, December 26, 2004,” which reference the horrors of natural disasters.
Wave Books
Mary Ruefle. Trances of the Blast, 2013.
Latest collection from one of the rising stars of American poetry.
I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive
– from Provenance
Joshua Beckman. The Inside of an Apple, 2013.
“His sincere, spare poems place the reader within the personal space of the author from inside his apartment to the mountains”
Hoa Nguyen. As Long As Trees Last, 2012.
“Grounded in the present tense—in the dailiness of politics and domesticity, citizenship and femaleness—Nguyen’s loose, everyday language performs a hook and snare on the ungraspable reality of 21st-century America.”
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Advice From 1 Disciple of Marx To 1 Heidegger Fanatic, 2013
“American readers might recognize Mario Santiago Papasquiaro as the eccentric and renegade Ulises Lima in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. This canonical, book-length poem of Infrarealism was Santiago Papasquiaro’s response to the Beats and chronicle of his own literary circle.”
Dorothy Lasky. AWE, 2007.
“An unforgettable debut: Lasky is a seductive prophet who delights as well as she terrifies.”