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88 pp 5.5 x 8.5 ISBN 0-9717265-1-5 (paper) $14.95
Publication Date: Spring 2003 |
Just Waking was a finalist for the for the 2004 Washington Book Award and a Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year Award. You can learn more on our news page.
Book Launch Celebration!
A book launching, reading, and book signing to celebrate the publication of Just Waking took place on 6 June 2003 at Auntie's Books, in Spokane, Washington. Please click here for more details.
Head low, collar reaching for clouds
And legs a slinking blur
I negotiate the thirteen blocks
Of Heep, Wyoming.
On the far edge, where sagebrush starts again
without apology
to be the feel and color of the earth, I turn
thinking
neither God nor I has blesses this place; and yet
bicycle loll against a fence
and five women by the P.O. laughed so long and big
I hear them still and a banner crudely lettered
vaults the street
to say, "Old Home Days in Heep, June 9 to June 15th;
say Howdy, Friend!"
So, Howdy Heep, though I am torn
and tripsing out among the bluish hills
pursuing
to keep off fierce pursuit. I'd say
if my own heart would not arrest me
for crimes of ill-designed loyalty and love.
I would stay if you belived I ought to be
a citizen
who wakes to simple foolish hours
and does not die or run
and run, like life
making its getaway.
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—The Bloomsbury Review
Deep in this book is an unfolding story of waking. Experience resonates clearly, emotively, paradoxically, and the imagination teaches and redeems through inner dialogue and vision. Read Machado" and "Lyric with Blue Horses" to see how moving and masterful a poet Christopher Howell is. If the poet James Wright were still living, we'd have two poets writing with such imperative, beauty, and depth.
—James Grabill
Once I began reading Just Waking, I had to read it straight through, late into the night. I had a growing need to experience the way these poems and their many voices move into the world of things and people and ghosts and ideas, with this speculative intelligence, this tender and sometimes comic discourse that by so loving a sense of what is beautiful in being alive always achieves the condition of music. I just didn't want the book to end.
—Bill Tremblay
 | Christopher Howell's seven collections of poems include the recent Memory and
Heaven from Eastern Washington University Press. He has received fellowships from the Oregon Arts
Commission, the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
His poems have appeared in such journals as Antioch
Review, Colorado Review, Field, Harper's, Hudson
Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry
Northwest, and Gettysburg Review, & have twice been awarded the Pushcart Prize. He has
taught at Colorado State
University, Willamette University, Whitman College,
Emporia State University, and Oregon State University, & teaches now in the Master of Fine Arts Program in
Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University where
he edits the semi-annual journal Willow
Springs. Since 1975 he has been director and
principal literary editor for Lynx House Press. |
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