The reviews are coming in for the 10th Cascadia Poetry Festival. Denise Calvetti-Michaels said:

I spent Saturday and Sunday afternoon, October 9th and 10th, attending the tenth annual Cascadia Poetry Festival held at the Rainier Community Beach Club in Seattle. I recall the breathtaking brilliance of early autumn, driving south along Lake Washington Blvd to Seward Park and beyond.

My gratitude for those presenters who honored the poets we lost this year including Chinese American poet Koon Woon, 1949-2026, who left way too soon as Paul Nelson tells us in the refrain: forget to die/if you would only forget to die.

The quality of listening by the audience was reverential as poets read  from the new anthology, Winter in America (Still, by Carbonation Press, editor Greg Bem. This segment at the close of the festival, was why I returned Sunday to read my poem, Sprouting After Rain, that threads locations where we may find wild nettle, khobeza grown in Gaza, and dandelion. The poem implies we may find common ground at the kitchen table with our bowl of soup, the table not a piece of furniture but a hearth. As I read my poem, the audience quietly listening, I felt grief for those who have perished, and those who did not perish but continue to face danger.

Is it possible to transform a weekend gathering toward the celebration of human connection? That is what I believe happened.  For a moment I was among family, the family of working poets, like one of the youngest poets from the anthology, Rhea Melina who read while her daughter of seven or eight stood nearby.  Rhea read her poem, I enlist the elements, that begins with the question:  Are your children your weapons?

You could say the festival returned me to my family, those working poets, alive today, who write, resist, give thanks, listen and support one another because it is what we do and we must.

Thank you Denise! & thank you Roxi Power for these photos of the Kubota Garden reading: