CPL Featured Poets

To continue to extend our gratitude to the generosity of our community, Cascadia Poetics Lab has decided to feature the work of our supporters on our blog! Our community is full of unbelievably talented poets, artists, musicians and more, and we want to not only be a resource for education and inspiration, but a way to connect and uplift the work of our talented supporters. If you’ve participated in an CPL workshop or event and want your work to be featured on our blog and Instagram, contact us HERE!

Logan Garner

Our first featured poet is Logan Garner, who has previously participated in the Poetry Postcard Fest. Logan Garner is a poet of place and the sacred, a winner of the Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize and an Olseth Family Foundation fellowship. Currently enrolled in the MFA program for Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, his work has been featured in the Orca Literary Journal, The Elevation Review, Flying Island, Oxford University’s Anthroposphere and many other journals and anthologies. He is the author of collections Here, in the Floodplain (Plan B Press, 2023) and The Sin of Feeding Wild Birds (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). You can find him on Instagram at @logangarnerpoetry and at https://www.logangarnerpoetry.com/ You can read some of his poetry below! 

THE RIVER

The Nehalem’s ribbon
drags over basalt.
I hold my breath for
an orange crowned warbler
trilling on the far slope.
But that crow, perched
just out of sight, lets me know
with black grinning haws
that we two lying
here on the grass,
look more than peaceful,
more than still. 

We look, it says, like bodies
losing temperature.
Declares us only deposits
turning toward entropy,
turning into earth.

RAVENS TUMBLING

They lifted on thermals.
Not gently, but thrust upward
as though a god-wind blew hard
into the drinking-glass clear sky,
and the flakes or bits of them
erupted out of its top.

They paused there, commas
between clauses of exhilaration
and dark expectation.
After that wing-tucked half second
the pair unfurled, cockeyed,
and fell turning on both axes,
discarding any cartesian calculus
in the chaos of their freefall.

I felt as I imagined they must,
as if all was lost,
but without it mattering—
to any of us—whether or not
they saved themselves
at the end of the sentence;
In their waiting they had already
inhabited both possibilities.