Over the years, Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sureand startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling, Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly...
Over the years, Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sureand startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling, Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly...
Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories--first names and dates, and faces...
Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, <...
Lynette is recuperating from botched Lasik surgery. Her eyesight is damaged, but as she looks back on the events of her past, she realizes she may not have seen them correctly when she was actually living them. Her husband s death . . . was it a suicide? The bones unearthed on her uncle s Montana ranch are they of a steer? a mastodon? a dinosaur? Her beloved cousin Jessie did she slip into addiction, and if so, where did the addict life take her? The dots of Lynette s past are blurry, but she tries to focus and connect them and to feel her way toward a more accurate vision of the person she...
Lynette is recuperating from botched Lasik surgery. Her eyesight is damaged, but as she looks back on the events of her past, she realizes she may not...
As usual, it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia salesboy. So begins Nance Van Winckel s latest collection of poetically altered encyclopedia entries that feature a mixture of quirky social satire and absurdist wit.
Entries like The Importance of Mood to Man use an encyclopedic tone to insist: Your body is two-thirds water. Mood is one-third body and Life and health depend on the mood taken into the body each day. An anatomic diagram of the nose is accompanied by the promise, A nose can smell rain coming. Alongside illustrations of the vestibule,...
As usual, it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia salesboy. So begins Nance Van Winckel s latest collection of po...
Poems "funny, stark, spot-on and utterly beautiful" comprise her collection, "Our Foreigner," "a brilliant and dark comedy." This is Betsy Sholl' s apt description for the poetry of Nance Van Winckel, one of the Northwest's foremost poets and writers, and her latest release-from The Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books. Van Winckel's own relatives traveled west enduring the hardship and tests of character that confronted those who made such treks in the 1800's. "Our Foreigner" explores, among other conditions and anomalies, ideas of journey, progress and regress, travel both...
Poems "funny, stark, spot-on and utterly beautiful" comprise her collection, "Our Foreigner," "a brilliant and dark comedy." This is Betsy Sholl' s ap...
