About Face, by Ann Gerike

We’re delighted and proud to publish Ann Gerike’s full-length manuscript, About Face: World War I Facial Injury and Reconstruction. In compassionate and powerful poetry and prose, About Face describes some of the thousands of forgotten facial reconstructions, many of them remarkably successful, performed at the Queen’s Hospital in England between 1917 and 1925, and the stalemated four-year trench warfare on the Western Front which produced most of the facial damage. Photographs.

“Ann Gerike’s collection would be remarkable enough for the sheer ambition of its project: to rescue the memories of thousands of World War I men whose battle injuries left their faces so disfigured, mirrors were kept from them, to be spared their ‘travesty of features.’ But don’t let this enormous accomplishment obscure the gorgeous craft of these lyrical, haunted poems. Each is a small gem, uncannily inhabited by a human presence–the mangled soldiers, yes, but also their bewildered wives and sweethearts, the artists who fashioned masks for gone faces, the surgeons who refused to give up.–Lorraine Healy

“The literal loss of face is a subject fraught with poetic implications, and threat. When the recognizable storefront is gone, how will others be able to know what’s inside? And even worse, unless you avoid mirrors and all reflecting surfaces, including the faces of others, how will you know yourself? Whatever else we may claim—about our souls, our spirits—at some deep level most of us see our bodies, and especially our faces, as our essential selves—from the Introduction.

Note: Photographs of the facial surgeries performed on Robert Davidson, Sidney Beldam, and Walter Fairweather on pp. 29, 30, and 32 are reproduced from the Archives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Learn more about About Face at www.aboutfacegerike.com.

2013. 64 pages. $15.99. ISBN: 978-1-930446-33-5.

Phlogiston, by Dennis Caswell

We’re delighted to publish Dennis Caswell’s first full-length manuscript, Phlogiston.

“The poems of Phlogiston are brimful with humor, intelligence, love of language, pop culture references, science factoids, and sexiness. I admire the deft blending of such cosmological, political, and religious oddities as ‘we pull back the future’s endless undies.’ And this joyful hilarity is balanced by a deeply personal and thoughtful poignancy in poems to a distant father, an aunt, Emily Dickinson (in anagrams), his mother. ‘… if our deaths are like stars that blew up ages ago, and we’re just waiting until the light gets here …’ these poems are gleefully lighting the way. –Peter Pereira

“Three titles from this book: ‘Jesus Slaves,’ ‘Fan Mail from Some Flounder,’ and ‘Richard Nixon’s Love Letters.’ Three lines: ‘And when the aliens come, / I want to be the one they pick / to explain model railroads and curling.’ Now moving, now funny, now both; but always quirky, Dennis Caswell reminds us that poetry thrives on surprise.–Jack McCarthy

2012. 90 pages. $12.00. ISBN: 978-1-930446-32-8.

The Cupboard Artist, by Molly Tenenbaum

We’re delighted to publish Molly Tenenbaum’s third full-length collection of poems.

“In Molly Tenenbaum’s The Cupboard Artist we get mauve and jet and puce and garnet, bronze gold thread, and flame. We get caterpillar yarn, chocolate suede, clotted malt, and firefall velvet dresses and blue aromas of pine. We get braids of burlap and rose brown grass and wedges and spindles and trusses and tweezers and peppercorn cheese. In short, we get every color, texture, taste and almost-fingertip-touched longing, in this keenly noticed collision of the inner and outer life, this erotic, musical, painterly, reflective and seriously joyous book. I love every page of it.”
Christopher Howell

“These densely imagistic poems are no stream of consciousness, but instead a stream of conflicting desires. Molly Tenenbaum presents us with food and flesh and the hunger that comes from wanting them even as you hold them in your hands-in such a richly populated world of things, she gives us true longing. While the possibilities are endless—say this, say that, ‘Say he never came back. Would you still / love to be alone?’—the woman, that held-at-a-distance ‘her,’ that these poems turn their gaze on can’t decide how to embrace the incompletion of desire. And so we join her in the pleasures of hunger, like the bees, ‘confused, so much air / between them and the flowers.'” —Keetje Kuipers

2012. 80 pages. $16.00. ISBN: 978-1-930446-28-1.

The Girl Who Goes Alone, by Elizabeth Austen [sold out]


We are delighted to announce the publication of poems by an important Seattle poet and community builder, Elizabeth Austen. The Girl Who Goes Alone is a very strong debut and presents poems in the voices of women in various s tates of unease, self aware and not, struggling with matters of faith, identity, love. Soul, humor, intelligence—it’s all here. Elizabeth is a longtime Pontoon contributor and we are very proud to publish this wonderful collection. Learn more about Elizabeth at her website. Be sure to listen to her poetry segments on KUOW every week.

Elizabeth Austen spent her teens and twenties working in the theatre and writing poems. A six-month solo walkabout in the Andes region of South America led her to focus exclusively on poetry. Her poems have appeared online and in journals including Verse Daily, Willow Springs, Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Seattle Review, DMQ Review, and the anthologies Poets Against the War, Weathered Pages, and In the Telling. Her second chapbook, Where Currents Meet, is part of the 2010 Toadlily Press quartet, Sightline. Elizabeth’s author interviews and commentary on Pacific Northwest poetry readings can be heard on KUOW, 94.9, public radio. She makes her living as a communications specialist at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she also offers poetry and journaling workshops for the staff.

2010. 40 pages. Sold out. ISBN: 978-1-930446-22-9.

Green Cammie, by Crysta Casey


Yusef Komunyakaa describes this collection of the late, beloved Northwest poet’s work:

“A lived intensity focuses and collects at the center of Crysta Casey’s Green Cammie, and the reader is immediately in a world of believable curses and small praises delivered through acute observation. The terse language seems so right for the vagaries of war. Each poem, through its fidelity to simplicity and orality, tends to illuminate a far-reaching field.”

2010. 52 pages. $12.00. ISBN: 978-1-930446-22-9.