One afternoon, I was in the Eagle Harbor bookstore on Bainbridge Island. I’d just been to a little wine shop for a tasting up the street. I was on my way to Hitchcock, a new Northwest-inspired restaurant, with my lovely girlfriend and kind mother, who was visiting from the Boston area. We stopped in the bookstore because it looked cute and what else are you supposed to do on Bainbridge Island right before lunch? 

Walking around bookstores, I find myself going first to the poetry section. I like to pick up a couple books, flip to a page, and get a feeling of the selection, the writers’ choices. When I found Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) that afternoon, I was surprised I’d never heard of the book before, and overjoyed it existed.

Flipping to the contents page, I saw a number of poets I knew, poets The Monarch had published, familiar names. But there were many I hadn’t heard of, many of whom I wanted to read. This is the beauty of Alive at the Center, it is an introduction to a region’s contemporary poets, an open portal into a community of dedicated, able, talented writers. When you pick up Alive, you realize, to borrow a phrase, that something is happening here.

I bought the book, went to lunch (the meal was great – gnocchi, squash and oysters!) and went back to Seattle. My mother, as it was getting late in the evening, went to her hotel room. My lady and I went back to her apartment for a glass of wine. I read Alive and almost got through the whole thing that night. I finished the book a few days later. I found myself reaching out to the poets in the pages, even to the book’s co-editor, Cody Walker. He explained his involvement in the collection and added that not only was there an Alive for Seattle, but there was one for Portland and Vancouver, sister cities joined in the burgeoning PNW arts scene.

I ordered that volume the next day. 

In the pages, one gets to know the dedicated Ooligan editors and the Portland State University students involved in the vast project (they admit they hope to continue the series for years to come). We get a sense of their camaraderie, a feeling that they believe something important is happening now – an unnamable thing, really, but one built on self-discovery and a buoying, creative community. We get to know the people of this collection. This is the book’s brilliance.