Daneen Bergland grew up in the Midwest, but eventually found her way home to the Pacific Northwest. She’s a recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, and her writing has appeared in several journals and books, including Propeller Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, and Alive at the Center: an Anthology of Contemporary Pacific Northwest Poets. She teaches at Portland State University.
The Goodbye Kit unfolds in a world lush with flora and fauna, evoking a contemporary garden of Eden. Themes of transgression and longing infuse these strange and lyrical poems about girlhood, marriage, parenthood, aging, and nature. The collection explores the relationships between humans and the natural world through “wolf-colored glasses” in an effort to articulate the complicated ecologies of intimacy, revealing us as the beautiful, culpable animals we are.
Irene Cooper’s writings appear in Beloit Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Witness, and elsewhere. She wrote the feminist noir novel Found, Committal, poet-friendly spyfy about family, and spare change, finalist for the Stafford/Hall award for poetry. Irene teaches at OSU-Cascades, is a founder of The Forge writing program, and facilitates creative opportunities in community. She lives in the middle of Oregon.
even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety is a collection bound by pulse and impulse, bent on giving body to the amorphic, and buoyed by the insistent beauty of a damaged planet. not only might we sing about the dark times, these poems agree, but also laugh as we struggle to find the light switch. with formal variation and sharp, innovative language that toggles from the lyric to the surreal, these poems awaken a new dreamscape in this age of anxiety, not unlike a deep and unexpected conversation with a stranger at a bar or in transit—intimate, funny, dark-edged, unsettling, and strangely life-affirming.
Airlie Press is a non-profit, collective press run by writers, and based in the Pacific Northwest. Each year we publish three full-length poetry collections -- two by writers from the PNW, and one national prize winner.