Garrett Hongo & Kevin Craft, OCEAN OF CLOUDS & TRAVERSE

Award-winning poets Garrett Hongo and Kevin Craft return to the store for their latest collections of poetry, Ocean of Clouds and Traverse.

In Ocean of Clouds, these poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet’s gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting. In Traverse, Craft explores family origins and discovery; an adoptee's journey toward self-knowledge, navigating the cross-currents of estrangement and acceptance; and a series of intense enquiries into the meaning of family.

About Ocean of Clouds

In his fourth book of poems, award-winning poet Garrett Hongo sees coastlines and waters, skylines and ancestral lines for what they inspire and teach. In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (“An oil slick from a yacht . . . / Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph / curving toward us”) or hanging out and playing LPs with the late, great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy twelve-year-old’s hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places: at the Wai‘ōpae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, “I thought of writing to the soul of Nâzim Hikmet, / saying loving a woman was like writing a book— / . . . it is love’s body on which you write a page of kisses . . .”

About Traverse

Traverse, Craft’s third collection, picks up where Vagrants & Accidentals left off, exploring the music, the miscues, the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life, shape us into the people we become. It’s a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee’s journey toward self-knowledge, a son’s journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent, navigating the cross-currents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss. It is also a history of walking, of moving through the world at human speed. As such, Traverse maps a new understanding of familial relation, from birth kin to chosen clan, from missing link to known donor children, arcing toward a wider embrace of the generational and archetypal substrates that inform identity, singular and plural alike. What kin are you to me? Craft asks, sifting through uncertainties, genealogies, and the geological record to find a deeper connection to both human and non-human nature, piecing together, step by step, a vision of expansive love, and the fragile ecology in which our lives subsist.

Poet and memoirist Garrett Hongo was born in Hawaiʻi and grew up there and in Los Angeles. His latest book Ocean of Clouds: Poems was just published in June. Other poetry collections are Yellow Light (1982), The River of Heaven (1988), which received the Lamont Poetry Prize and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Coral Road (2011). His most recent non-fiction is The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (2022). He has also published The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (1995). Poems and essays of his appear in the New Yorker, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Terrain, and elsewhere. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2022, he was given the Aiken Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. He lives in Eugene where he has taught at the University of Oregon since 1989.

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. For two decades he also served as a faculty director of the University of Washington’s Writers in Rome Program. His books include Traverse (Lynx House Press, 2024), Vagrants & Accidentals (UW Press, 2017), and Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005). In addition, he edited five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum, an annual collection of Italian translation and Mediterranean-inspired travel writing (Writ in Water Press, 2004 – 2009). He has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Camargo Foundation (France), 4Culture, The Jack Straw Cultural Center, PLAYA, Artist Trust, and held a post as Writer in Residence at the UW Rome Center and at Olympic National Park. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves as publisher, and edits the imprint Poetry NW Editions. His writing explores the value of memory and the durability of relationships, particularly in non-traditional families and nomadic communities, in the passages of deep time, and under contemporary pressures of profound ecological change.

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