Pacific Walkers: Poems

by Nance van Van Winckel

Overview

Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories—first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs—but who no longer belong to anyone.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295992815
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	02/07/2013
Series:	Pacific Northwest Poetry Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.70(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nance Van Winckel is the author of five books of poetry, including No Starling and After a Spell, winner of the Washington State Governor's Award for Poetry, and three collections of short stories. Her numerous awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and Poetry Magazine's Friends of Literature Award. She lives near Spokane, Washington, with her husband, the artist Rik Nelson.

Table of Contents

Pacific Walkers

Signing on with The Daily Sun

Last Address

Briefing

His Other Car Was a Train

John Doe #130969

The River That Runs Above

The River That Runs Beneath

I Too Sip from the Flask

Annunciation

Afraid of My Rays, No One Comes Near

When the River Comes toward Me

Complete Stranger

As Reported

I Take Notes in the Cold

Only As Good As Your Feet

Compromised State

Say What You Will

Retablo

“Outlaw Mentality”

My Weight in Ants

The River Pulls Awake a Morning

Decked Out

They Flee from Me

Unflappable

Apparently Not

Strobe

Coordinates of X

Happy & Terrified When We Wake

II / RAIN ON

Rained On

What Is the Who?

A Man Mistakes Me for a Mannequin

Take Them from Me

A Last Moth of August

My You Mother May I?

Thin Ice

Stopped in the Midst of Going On

Late June, 1960

Write Back When You Can

Canals

Stole (Wedding Photograph, 1911)

On Hudson Street

In Our Minds

Ground into Being

Crypt Window

At Value Village

Song of the Sang-Froid (Who Knocketh?)

I Am My Own Assistant

Once I Had a Badge

I Have My Own Damned Family—Thank You

Very Much—But Theirs Apparently Has Nobody

Nuzzle

Who Died and Made You Our Foreigner?

Coming to Her Senses

The Definite Article

Art Brut

Shut Up & Row

No Sign of My Passing

Acknowledgments

About the Poet

A Note on the Type

What People are Saying About This

Matthew Dickman

"Nance Van Winckel’s new collection is alive with the natural world, full of kinetic storytelling and a willingness to observe even the smallest part of our lives which, of course, often impact us the most. This is also a book of poems that celebrate the ten thousand things of our culture, from the Bronze Age to Value Village. Van Winckel knows that part of the poet’s job is to witness back to us our own experience and she does this with a voice I am happy to know is singing in the sometimes dark and rainy days of our planet."

From the Publisher

"An exquisite collection. Those who love stories; those who are interested in ways of thinking about memory, the passing of time, family history, old photographs; and those who enjoy just hovering for a moment in the beauty of arresting details and language will be eager readers of Pacific Walkers."—Nancy Eimers, author of A Grammar to Waking and Oz

"Nance Van Winckel’s new collection is alive with the natural world, full of kinetic storytelling and a willingness to observe even the smallest part of our lives which, of course, often impact us the most. This is also a book of poems that celebrate the ten thousand things of our culture, from the Bronze Age to Value Village. Van Winckel knows that part of the poet’s job is to witness back to us our own experience and she does this with a voice I am happy to know is singing in the sometimes dark and rainy days of our planet."—Matthew Dickman, author of Mayakovsky's Revolver and All-American Poem

Nancy Eimers

"An exquisite collection. Those who love stories; those who are interested in ways of thinking about memory, the passing of time, family history, old photographs; and those who enjoy just hovering for a moment in the beauty of arresting details and language will be eager readers of Pacific Walkers."

Editorial Reviews

"Van Winckel's intersections of then and now, other and us, are the stuff of real poetry."

City Living - Mike Dillon

"Van Winckel's intersections of then and now, other and us, are the stuff of real poetry."—Mike Dillon, City Living

"These moving poems span a multifaceted range of narrators."—Publishers Weekly, January 2013

From the Publisher