Beth Piatote with Rena Priest — 'distant water'

Third Place Books welcomes Nez Perce scholar, playwright, poet, and Indigenous language revitalization activist Beth Piatote to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new poetry collection, , which brings the reader into the language of our shared home, North America, revealing a sonic world and grammar governed by rivers, kinship, and ancestral knowledge. Author and 6th Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest joins in conversation.

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An exquisite debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection of land, sound, and spirit.

Drawing its title from the Nez Perce word for ocean, distant water explores the mysterious process through which language is conveyed from one body to another, moving through waters, kin, memory, and breath. In this meditative, expansive collection, Beth Piatote reveals language as a shared vibration, a life force that sustains an intimate, animate world. Anchored in the Nez Perce homelands of the Northwest, the poems in distant water explore sonic and spiritual ecologies, recognizing land and language as living beings with whom we seek a common mode of expression.

Here, poetic forms mimic the verb-centered structure of Nez Perce language, showing its capacity to express from a single shared root the movement of a sewing needle, the flow of a river, or the memory of a lost love. Language resonates with the land, in poems that recall the drumbeat pulse of blood, an echo of grief, the sigh of a dying fire, an archive held in the mouth of a crow. Characters and motifs from traditional stories are recast, celebrating their timeless beauty, humor, and wisdom, and remedies imagined for historical wounds borne by the language itself.

Inventive and resonant, precise and playful, distant water is an invitation to enter a vibrant thought world, to dwell in a grammar and sound born of and belonging to Nez Perce homelands and people, a language at once ancient and ever new.

Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce scholar, playwright, poet, and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include The Beadworkers, which was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects. Her play, Antíkoni, had its world premiere with Native Voices in Los Angeles in November 2024. Her poems, scholarly essays, and short stories have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including American Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, World Literature Today, and PMLA. An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Piatote is devoted to the study of her heritage language of Nez Perce and is an Indigenous language revitalization activist. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Rena Priest is an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She served as the 6th Washington State Poet Laureate (2021-2023) and is the recipient of awards and fellowships, including the 2024 Washington State Book Award, the 2020 Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award, and the 2018 American Book Award. Her collection of essays, Positively Uncivilized, was selected as the inaugural winner of the 2024 Raven Chronicles Press Keepers of the Fire Award. Her poetry and non-fiction appear widely online and in print. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

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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