Proceeds from the sale of all Exquisite Disarray books go to support the publication of Northwest writers.

I’ve always thought regional anthologies were important. It’s too easy for voices to go unrecognized in their own backyard, or for poets living very near to one another not even to know of one another’s proximity. Shared geography doesn’t necessarily mean shared themes, or even shared imagery. Witness the urban bravado and word play of Davin Ivery, the universal meditations on grief and loss of Lynn Martin, the sweetly attentive observing eye of Stephen Jaech. The poets in this volume see their own vision of landscape and experience, and their range is broad. William Kupinse and Tammy Robacker have done an able job of putting together a compelling collection of well-known and emerging poets that goes beyond the regional. This book is just one more proof that poetry is thriving.

        -Samuel Green, Washington State Poet Laureate

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I’ve followed William Kupinse’s work for several years, always with a sense of surprise at his ability to convey difficult truths in poems that blend instruction with pleasure—the pleasure of clarity and apt word choices, of close observation, of humor, of narrative finesse and a subtle grasp of human psychology. The overriding concern for our threatened natural environment lends gravity to this book, and readers will also discover in it an interface between that environment and what might be called “Verbal Ecology”

        -Alfred Corn, author of Stake: Poems, 1972-1992

Fallow engages reflectively with the world as it is—decaying, damaged, lush, fallow, oblivious— not the world as we might wish it to be. As the speaker of “A Stirring” asserts, “… when the world begins to stir again, it mixes / from scratch, borrows nothing from the shelf / of our concern.” In poems both lyric and narrative, Kupinse relies on observation and experience to foreground collective human concerns: the effects of economic policies and environmental practices, the connections between history and our shared future, the consolations of love. These poems warn and memorialize, notice, name, and remember. Kupinse’s compassion is personal and political, and these poems draw our attention to the natural world we inhabit—and which inhabits us.

-Deirdre O’Connor, author of Before the Blue Hour

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