Becky’s Pick of the Month (Crow Mercies is Magically Delicious)

This month, we’re excited to release Crow Mercies by Penelope Scambly Schott. I was personally very drawn to this manuscript early in the production process. Schott’s poetry has a magical realism quality to it that I admire in fiction authors like Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison (also, Kathleen Alcalá, who published this fantastic book), but that unusual to find in the contemporary poetry of the Pacific Northwest.  Her imaginative narratives push the boundaries of what is metaphor and what is description, to a place that my “poetry gut” desperately wants to go.

My favorite poem, “Holes in the World” is a good example of what I mean by this.  In other poems, her mother is a Calypso Orchid, a homeless woman lives in someone’s closet, and the speaker sits with an ancient Croatian woman, but in “Holes in the World,” Schott’s subject is a bear husband.

She starts off with an italicized section that establishes our interconnectivity, “breath from the mouth/ blood from the womb // vertebrae of dead whales / reamed by the seas.”

In the verse that follows, the speaker is taken by a bear husband “to wive/ and we mated in a cave.”  The poem is broken into couplets to better illustrate this coupling of nature and human, and freedom and captivity.

I tell my husband the bear

I am not you

This, I explain is the source

of our lonesomeness

paw to paw

and the air between us.

It’s writing that dares to venture into the strange and the magical that is brave enough to say something real.  While Schott’s writing is still fairly linear and deeply rooted in narratives, her subjects and imaginative leaps twist the experience of the reader in surprising ways.

While I tend to think of Schott’s work as magical realism, Poet Peter Sears in this blurb calls it surrealism. How would you classify Schott’s work? Or, does her poetry resist this kind of categorization?

Remember, all month Crow Mercies is 20% off and has free shipping. Don’t miss your chance to read it for yourself!

–Rebecca Olson, Assistant Editor

Feminism Friday: A Little CALYX History

The Fall CALYX Glitterati is celebrating Frida Kahlo’s art and Dia de los muertos (October 21^st, Corvallis Arts Center), and as I was looking through old files searching for extra copies of the artist Frida Kahlo’s color plates that we published in the International Anthology I was digging through dusty files in the back room. This resulted in an impromptu lesson to staff and interns on the history of publication layout. I actually don’t remember the exact date we switched to laying out publications completely on the computer. But as I pulled out the complicated cover layouts—hand done in the days before art was handled from computer images—the layers of plastic and instructions for each layer of color were a surprise for the younger staff and interns—particularly the mathematical computations that had to be done for each piece of art. Most surprising was recognizing my handwriting on some of the covers, having forgotten I often had to lay out covers myself.

Kelsey (Assistant Director) and Meghan (intern) with Women and Aging publication layout

Life is so much easier with computerized cover design. As we finalized the cover art and design for the new book Crow Mercies (by Penelope Schott), Cheryl McLean (of Imprint Service who does our production and design) sent 4 variations on 3 different pieces of art for our final consideration. Our Senior Editor watched Cheryl do the magical design and said some of the variations took place in minutes. What a difference from the days we did all those mathematical computations, cut out the red gelatin borders, and wrote instructions to the printer on each page of the layout.

Different alternatives for the cover of Crow Mercies

~Margarita Donnelly, Director

Staff Pick of the Week

Staff Pick Discount: FREE SHIPPING

This week our staff pick is Open Heart, a full length collection by Judith Sornberger, to celebrate the news that a CD including a song written to her poem “Pioneer Child’s Doll” has received several Grammy nominations. “Pioneer Child’s Doll” appeared in Open Heart in 1993.

Judith writes, “The song by that title is part of a song cycle called ‘Within These Spaces’ on a CD of composer Lori Laitman’s songs by the same title. In addition to the other nominations for the album as a whole, the song cycle has been nominated under the ‘contemporary classical composition’ category.”

We on the staff still cannot get enough of her poems, even seventeen years later. Hilda Raz, editor of Prairie Schooner, praised Open Heart saying “Judith Sornberger’s superb first collection of poems is about the fracture of conventional wisdom under the pressure of women’s experience…. The poet’s control of form holds her readers in place while Sornberger steals, retells, and resignifies women’s stories.”

Click here to purchase with FREE SHIPPING (save $4)!

Staff Pick of the Week

The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes: Notes from Nepal

Revised edition, 2005, by Barbara J. Scot

Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award

The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes: Notes from Nepal, winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, is a moving memoir of a western woman’s transformative sojourn in Nepal. Scot’s vivid account of living, teaching, and trekking in Nepal demonstrated insight into cultural difference while confronting the complex issues of development work and the status of Nepali women. In 2004, Scot returned to Nepal, and in this new edition she records her reactions to the changes the country experienced in the last decade, particularly the current political unrest and the effects on the country of a Maoist insurgency. Scot looks back on her original experience in Nepal and its impact on her life, and reacts to the differences she observed during her recent journey.

Check out the book here