Join us for an evening of poetry featuring Airlie Press authors presenting their new work! Featuring poets Daneen Bergland, Irene Cooper, and Valerie Witte.
Airlie Press is a nonprofit publisher run by writers, dedicated to cultivating and sustaining fine contemporary poetry and to promoting poets from the Pacific Northwest—and beyond.
Daneen Bergland grew up in the Midwest but found her way home to the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of The Goodbye Kit (Airlie, 2024), 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: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest. She has been a recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, and she teaches at Portland State University.
About The Goodbye Kit:
Narrative but elliptical, The Goodbye Kit is awash in lyric that thrills as it laments. Themes of transgression and longing infuse these poems about girlhood, marriage, parenthood, aging, and nature. Mapping the charged terrain of human relationship, and marked by a feral sensuality, they explore ecologies of intimacy made tangible through both experience and witness. Their impulse is to capture and project beauty and loss, offering a view of our mutable and tender selves through “wolf-colored glasses,” revealing us as the beautiful, culpable animals we are.
Irene Cooper’s writings appear in Beloit Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Witness, and elsewhere. Author of even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety (Airlie 2024), she also 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, facilitates creative opportunities in community, and currently serves as an editor for Airlie Press. She lives in the middle of Oregon.
About even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety:
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.
Valerie Witte is the author of multiple poetry and hybrid books, most recently A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie, 2023) and, in collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal, The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019), the first of a two-part project exploring the work of postmodern dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. The second book in the project, a collection of experimental essays, is One Thing Follows Another (punctum books, 2024). She currently edits education books in Portland, OR. More at valeriewitte.com.
About A Rupture in the Interiors:
Polyphony of silk and skin, A Rupture in the Interiors is a rapturous exploration of im/perfection, threading innovative form and histories of value—of the female body, especially, and of material worth—with dream logic and associative mastery. This is a modern tapestry of everyday traumas that, while seemingly minor, mark us all as participants in the human experience. Woven together, these images of disorder and defect tell a story of the superficial damage that runs deep, and that cannot slip from us unseen or unfelt.