The Department of English is proud to announce that one of our faculty and one of our graduate students have launched new books of poetry.
Senior Lecturer Frances McCue has published Timber Curtain (Chin Music Press) which collects poems written during the filming of the forthcoming documentary Where the House Was. The documentary memorializes the demolition of the building--1634 11th Ave--that had long been the site of Seattle literary institution Richard Hugo House (which McCue had helped to found back in 1996). The poems in Timber Curtain meditate on that demolition, consider the effect of gentrification on the Capitol Hill neighborhood, and explore the phenomenon of "facadamies," the preservation of a building's street-facing exterior while replacing everything behind that skin.
Ph.D student E.J. Koh has published A Lesser Love, the winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry. D.A. Powell writes, "Love, war and recovered testimony from Korea’s unhealed border inform the formal and imaginative boundaries within E.J. Koh’s panoptic poems...[She] imagines the details of her own CIA file, revises the Pledge of Allegiance, and translates Beyoncé. With acuity and dexterity, this poet leaps into the dangers of the present."