Lovesong for Dufur
by Penelope Scambly Schott

In Lovesong for Dufur, Penelope Scambly Schott tells the intriguing story of buying a modest old house in an out-of-the-way, east-of-the mountains Oregon town. The town, Dufur, is small enough that everyone knows what necessities are in the food bank, “toilet paper and laundry soap,” and “who shot whom.” It is the sort of town people often refer to as in the middle of nowhere, but she falls in love with the place and makes it her own, affirming that “There is No Blue Like This Blue Sky over Dufur.” These charming and original poems are enough to make you want to go in search of your own alternate life in the wonderful Western nowhere. — Barbara Drake

I have lived all my life in Wasco County except for World War II. I have lived in Dufur since 1973. Penelope's poetry made me look at this little town in a better and different way. — Everett Marvel, retired rancher, age 90, member of the unofficial DP morning coffee club at Kramer's Market

ISBN 978-0-9700302-5-2
Paperback / 50 pages
Price $15
Spring 2013

Steptoe Butte
by Bill Siverly

Every poem in Steptoe Butte is beautifully balanced on a middle line, and the book as a whole, balanced on a middle poem. It’s a structure that encourages backing and forthing, as you sound out the conversation and correspondences, poem to poem; and this reading and rereading for pleasure and deeper understanding is, to my way of thinking, the greatest gift a book of poetry can offer a reader. —Molly Gloss

In Steptoe Butte, Bill Siverly demonstrates a poetic structure developed from millennia of European and indigenous oral poetry. Each poem’s stanzas balance on a fulcrum of a middle line which carries a central thought. And the thoughts range widely, from relapse and detox to grandchildren learning to plant potatoes, from the massacres marking American conquest to an intimate evening in Germany marking a “love redeemed.” Steptoe Butte takes us from cultivated garden to wild sacred mountain, from the writer’s home to the dwellings of Goethe, Heidegger, Jung. In clear, succinct, crisp, language, Siverly holds the mirror up to life today and life as it has been, presenting a parade of images that leaves the reader a bit more understanding, a bit more questioning, and deeply pleased. —Michael McDowell

ISBN 978-0-9700302-4-5
Paperback / 72 pages
Price $15
Spring 2013

The Hundred-Year House
by Michael McDowell

Michael McDowell clearly knows the nuanced seasons of the great Northwest at all elevations. In The Hundred-Year House these deeply felt poems take us from Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula, to Portland’s Council Crest, to the Timberline Trail in the Mt. Hood Wilderness. His poetic voice expresses a love of family and place that combines sweetness with a wry wit as he tells stories that begin with a great-grandmother planting pine seeds at the family beach house in 1883 and take us into the 21st century and a daughter watching the flash of a lighthouse through pine branches. This rich and lovely collection provides a myriad of shared memories for those who know the region and those who would like to. —Barbara Drake

From sand in the sheets to moles in the lawn, too-present mosquitoes to absent meteors, night moose to Memaloose, Michael McDowell guides us through a wondrous maze of Northwest icons via language both lovely and loose. As he says in “Burnt Toast,” “there is no sweetness without ashes in the mouth,” but he delivers the hard parts and bitters wrapped in an essential sweetness that is deeply knowing, and anything but naive. Awake to the land, its life, and their working parts, McDowell tells his wonderfully varied tales with wit, whimsy, and devastating aim. —Robert Michael Pyle

ISBN 978-0-9700302-2-1
Paperback / 74 pages
Price $15
Fall 2011

What Remains / Was Bleibt
by Ingrid Gottschalk
translated from the German by Jutta Donath and Daniella King

“What Remains is a collection of poems in which the poet shares the experience of a love affair that lasted a lifetime. Two people, seemingly destined for each other since childhood, found themselves in other marriages, but remained connected. When they found each other again very late in their lives, their passion reignited. The poet speaks of her anguish, hope, sensuality, loneliness, longing, and despair. Her strong and clear language makes her poems not so much a lament but an account of every nuance of a passionate love affair.” —Jutta Donath

"Was Bleibt schildert das Erleben einer Liebe, die ein ganzes Leben lang bestehen bleibt. Von Kindheit an füreinander bestimmt, entschliessen sich diese zwei Menschen jedoch zu anderen Ehen, bleiben aber miteinander verbunden. Als sie spät in ihrem Leben wieder zueinander finden, flammt die alte Leidenschaft erneut auf. Die Dichterin spricht von Schmerz, Hoffnung, Erotik, Einsamkeit, Sehnsucht und Verzweiflung. Ihre starke und klare Sprache klagt jedoch nicht. Diese Gedichte sind Darstellung eines menschlichen Erlebnisses, das sie mit jeder Nuance einer leidenschaftlichen Liebe beschreibt." —Jutta Donath

ISBN 978-0-9700302-3-8
Paperback Bilingual Edition / 56 pages
Price $10 / €11
Fall 2010

Driving One Hundred
by Barbara Drake

“Barbara Drake’s witty humor, appreciated over the years by many readers, seeps joyfully into these pages. But that’s not all. There’s the ever-accurate observation of birds and the natural world, brought vividly into the reader’s imagination; and the startling and beautiful images: I’m left with a red horse standing chest high in a marsh. Underneath the well-honed poetic voice, stretches a bedrock of wisdom gained from looking squarely at the world around her and at the passing of years in a life well examined.” —Judith Barrington

ISBN 978-0-9700302-1-4
Paperback / 112 pages
Price $15
Fall 2009

The Turn: Poems and Reflections 1987-1997
by Bill Siverly

"The Turn"—die Wende—refers to November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. The pieces in this book were written in light of that upwelling of spirit, when old political tensions were passing from the scene and something new was going on, a transition of hope rising. They also concern a ten-year period, 1987-1997, a longer, slower turn of the wheel in Germany—and elsewhere in Europe—at levels both personal and politcal, towards the process of reunification. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the events in the book, the questions raised are just as pertinent.

Clearwater Way: Poems
by Bill Siverly

Clearwater Way is a journey from the Washington Coast, up the Columbia, Snake, and Clearwater rivers, through Lewiston (my hometown), and into the woods of north Idaho. In personal terms it represents a journey back in time to my childhood in the 1950s and '60s. The inspiration to make this book a journey upriver came from the Wasco myth cycle about Coyote, who, starting at the mouth of the Columbia, created land forms, resources, and cultural practices as far as Lapwai, Idaho. Clearwater Way evokes this landscape. Some places within it can no longer be found except in the deeper layers of memory and the unconscious, and in the poetry that draws them back and gives them life and the past regained. Other places remain as present as rivers and mountains themselves, the resonance of their being echoing through our lives and in these poems.—Bill Siverly