Washington State Magazine

Category: Poetry

13 review(s) found that match this category.

On This Borrowed Bike
Spring 2015
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 ...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Poets


New & Noteworthy for Winter 2014
Winter 2014
After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness by 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 persona...
Categories: Cultural studies, Poetry, Anthropology
Tags: African Americans, Basketball, Southwest United States


Love Reports to Spring Training
Fall 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 eve...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Baseball, Romance


We Are the Bus
Summer 2013
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...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Basketball, Memory


A Chinaman’s Chance
Fall 2011
WSU English professor Alex Kuo’s newest collection of poetry, A Chinaman’s Chance: New and Selected Poems 1960-2010, will sadden, fascinate, and unexpectedly jar its readers into a fresh perspective of the sometimes terrifying world that ...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Race, China


Black Leapt In
Spring 2011
In Chris Forhan’s latest collection of poems, Black Leapt In, the writer draws upon his childhood in Seattle, using striking natural images and startling honesty and insight. He balances straightforward description of the environment he grew ...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Seattle, Family


The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
Winter 2002
How to describe Robinson Jeffers, now 40 years deceased? Visionary or reactionary? Hard-eyed realist or Romantic throwback? The West's answer to the East's Robert Frost? California's anti-type in poetry and politics to John Steinbeck in fiction and p...
Categories: Poetry, Literature
Tags: American West


New Poets / Short Books, Volume One
Spring 2008
Three collections of poems, by Gwendolyn Cash, Boyd W. Benson, and Lisa Galloway, each numbering something over 20 pages, comprise the first volume of Lost Horse Press's New Poets / Short Books series under the editorship of renowned poet Marvin Bell...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Anthology


Down Along the Sunset
Winter 2002
In this slender volume of 29 poems Benner Cummings ('51 Speech & Hearing Sci.) pays homage to the romance of surfing. Based upon Cummings's years as surfing and swimming coach at San Clemente High School, the poems celebrate the beauty, grace, daring...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Surfing


In Praise of Fertile Land
Summer 2005
There aren't many anthologies that juxtapose poems by the likes of Robert Frost with those of elementary school kids. In Praise of Fertile Land does, and it works. My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Towar...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Northwest history


Hiding from Salesmen
Winter 2003
"Talk happiness," wrote the prolific poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox about 125 years ago. "The world is sad enough / Without your woe." The former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins has largely gone in that direction, and so has Scott Poole ('92 B.S. Psych.; ...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Humor


Famous
Winter 2007
When it comes to fame and poetry, the locus classicus surely must be this passage from Milton's "Lycidas": "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days." We of t...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Popular culture


The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars
Fall 2005
While undertaking a 15-minute workout on the elliptical machine at the fitness center, I read a dozen poems from Chris Forhan's 2003 Morse Prize-winning book, The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars. Some poetry lovers might regard this as a shallow gestur...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Memory