An evening of poetry with Michael Daley and Claudia Castro Luna

Third Place Books is delighted to welcome Washington poets Michael Daley and Claudia Castro Luna to our Ravenna store. Daley and Castro Luna will be reading their poetry and prose, and discussing the work behind their respective books: Daley's poetry collection and novel ; and Castro Luna's and. This event is free and open to the public.

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The poems in Reinhabited have survived a slow burn through four and a half decades. Five slim collections, the first and second twenty-five years apart, adhere to an ethic of place which runs through: The Straits, To Curve, Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest, Of a Feather, and Born With. Though far-ranging in their settings and themes, Michael Daley's New & Selected Poems embody a deep bicoastal commitment through reminiscent descriptions of the New England where he grew up, and through meditations on his adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, where the practice of the art of poetry has sustained him. The spirit of a wanderer praising wilderness, the wind, cloud mass, human community, the hearty lives of plants and animals, rings through these poems. Romance With the Unexpected, a long discursive poem, anchors Reinhabited on the high seas of spiritual awakening.

Tel machus, archetype of the boy left behind, is portrayed in this novel by Bobby Bacca, whose father, M.M.Bacca, the famous poet, has died. Bobby, an artist who has gone in search of his father's past, revisits the Bacca legend through stories told by those who knew him best, while his own memories intersect with the effects of trauma pervading the adult lives of his contemporaries. This "sidebar of an odyssey" modernizes the abandonment and allure for might that 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil takes as her foundation for declaring Homer the first and greatest pacifist poet. Though Mac Bacca is no hero, nor is he a Leopold Bloom, his aberrant and twisted personality takes us on a ride over some strange country along the neglected yet familiar path of the male soul.

In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moon is a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.

In this epic poetry collection Killing Marías, Claudia Castro Luna, both poetically and physically, settles spaces that were unclaimed by Latinas. Her inscription of the disappeared women of Juárez is a live cartographic image of struggle and spiritual survival. Castro Luna does not allow for these dead women to lack agency; they nourish us and the earth, and they speak with their bodies, literally, positioning themselves as recovered entities with agency, in the poet's skilled narrativizing hands.

Michael Daley, born in Boston and a PNW resident for over 50 years, is the author of 16 books. In 2022, he published Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems (DosMadres, Ohio), Telemachus, a novel (Pleasure Boat Studio, Seattle), and True Heresies, poems (Cervena Barva, Massachusetts). He founded Empty Bowl in 1976 and currently is managing editor of The Madrona Project anthology series. His poems, essays and stories have been published widely in such journals as Raven Chronicles, The Seattle Review, Ploughshares, New England Review & Breadloaf Quarterly, Story/Houston, North American Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Rhino, Alaskan Review, Cirque, and elsewhere.
Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022); One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press); the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press). Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna arrived in the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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