Seattle in the Thirties and Forties was a sometimes seedy, often melancholy place, full of toil (if you were lucky enough to be working), human tragedy and blue-collar boredom. Leo Lassen’s night baseball broadcasts were the city’s most popular entertainment. Crime was commonplace. Frequently it fell to deputies in what today is called the Medical Examiner’s Office to reconstruct the facts about those with shattered bodies and fractured lives.

Sixth entry in the Ravenna series that brings together three similar or dispirit writers in one volume.  This time Lindsay Stern takes us on a tour of the Cambodian Dictionary; Philip Quinn transports us poetically into the spirit of the Minoan, Jefferson Navicky instructs us with fictions on the uses of a Library.

“Lovely, clever and strange,” a full-color art book documenting assemblages made from items found in thrift stores, reminiscent of Cornell, but largely emerging from the framing box — given titles and poetic captions which speak to the “plaintive aura of lives outlived by objects.”  Declared “Beautiful, witty, tragic and basically holy-*-great” by Open Books: A Poem Emporium, Seattle (where it is available.)  70 pps, 2014.  ISBN:  978-0-9905265-5-1.  First in a series of three books.

Samples:

In her most topically comprehensive collection of poetry, Rantala considers her heritage as she knows it — spare of fact, filled with impression and effect.  At varying times lyrical, modernist, post-modern and runic, the pieces create an eclectic symphony of the individual, as unique as the orchestra in which her immigrant grandfather played in early 20th Century Astoria, Oregon.

A harrowing narrative poem of the Thirty Years’ War.  In a departure from prose, Lock gives us poetry “as muscular as Skelton’s but with the wit, precision, and grace of bonsai.  Not since Ted Hughes’ Crow have we encountered [in Nicolaas Jansen, soldier, deserter, poet] a figure with this much disturbing gravity and charisma.”

“Lora and The Dark Lady” takes two of poetry’s most compelling figures, the heroine of Petrarch’s sonnets and Shakespeare’s mysterious mistress, and re-imagines and re-configures them as characters in a disturbed and technologically-threatening world.