I love that I barely turn a corner on social media these days without hearing of a new title by a local writer. The Inland Northwest is teeming with them! Here are some of the books I’m most excited to add to my shelves.

Perhaps one of the most respected, oft-published poets in our region, Christopher Howell’s latest, The Grief of a Happy Life (University of Washington Press, October, 2019), has been leaping off of local bookstore shelves. Howell was a military journalist during the Vietnam War, and has since published a solid dozen poetry collections, garnering multiple awards on a local and national level, including the Washington State Book Award and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, mentoring our region’s newest literary talent. This latest collection has been compared to Wordsworth and Gilgamesh, and with good reason. Featuring a cast of characters as wide ranging as Aeneas and Saint Teresa, the collection examines how our polarities (contentment/grief, remembering/imagining) pull and push against one another, how they define and merge. Pick up a The Grief of a Happy Life and find out why Christopher has been called “our finest active poet in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the finest nationally.”

Another local poet, Brooke Matson, is also writing on a major national stage, having received the notable Jake Adam York Prize of Poetry for her latest collection, In Accelerated Silence (Milkweed, February 2020). You might recognize Brooke’s name from the incredible work she’s done with Spark Central, the forward-thinking community center in Kendall Yards, where she is Executive Director. 

Like Christopher’s latest, Brooke’s collection is a close study of grief, revolving around the cancer and death of a beloved. The publisher says, “In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries—between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to…” Brooke builds these startling poems from ideas of Eve and the pomegranate, the multiverse, the atom bomb, supermassive stars and more, making the collection as broad-reaching and sprawling as it is intimate and exact. I cried at her recent event, where she performed the poems from memory to the accompaniment of a cello, as much moved by her understanding of grief as by her profound recognition that there is so much we as humans will never grasp. I’m absolutely wowed by this collection.

Also as profound and powerful, but in a slap-your-knee, laugh-out-loud, cry-as-much-from-the-truth-as-from-the-humor sort of way, is Tiffany Midge’s latest, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (Nebraska Press, Ocober, 2019). Tiffany is a wonderful humorist and delivers some of the most complex, interesting, and sharpest cultural criticisms in the lit world. An award-winning poet living in Moscow, Idaho, Tiffany is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux, and has published writing widely in Indian Country, McSweeney’s, Lit Hub and more. Sarah Vowell raves about the book, as does Devon Mihesua, who calls her a “literary comedic genius,” acknowledging her riffs on Native life, Anne Coulter, and “the use of ‘ugh’ in American literature.” LOL.

Spokane born-and-raised writer S.M. Hulse, now a professor at The University of Nevada in Reno, has just published a second novel, Eden Mine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2020). Her first novel, Black River, was a PEN/American finalist and an American Library Association notable book. Like Black River, Eden Mine is set in Montana, but this time in a small town hit hard by an act of domestic terrorism. S.M. Hulse is a master of writing sensitively about family, faith, and the rural West, and this will no doubt be another beautifully-written page-turner. 

And while we’re discussing page-turners, check out Ian Pisarcik’s debut novel, Before Familiar Woods (Crooked Lane Books, March 2020). A starred review in Publisher’s Weekly says this mystery thriller is “an outstanding debut that begins in the aftermath of a tragedy,” and Booklist calls it “Hemingway-haunted.” Ian was born and raised in rural New England, and the novel is set in Vermont, but Pisarcik lives here in the Inland Northwest with his family.

And, a little plug for my own independent publishing company (although not really, since Scablands Books is donating all proceeds to the new Carl Maxey Center), the chapbook anthology Try This at Home is out now from the Diverse Voices Writing Group of Spokane (Scablands Books, February 2020). Filled with poetry, memoir, fiction, and more, the anthology showcases several fresh new literary voices and is a celebration of diversity here in the Lilac City. 

Pick these titles up and more at our wonderful local bookstores, Auntie’s and Wishing Tree Books. Support your local indie booksellers. And you can always request them through your local Spokane Public Library or Spokane County Library District branch.

Here’s to a gorgeous spring filled with new reads.