Not Now but Soon (Concrete Wolf Louis Award) - Softcover

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A Pacific Northwest native, Chris Dahl was raised among the brash sighs of fir trees in winter and the soothing lullabies of grasshoppers and crickets in summer. This environment led to a poetic process that she describes as cupping her hand into a murky pond and offering the contents for examination: tadpoles and larvae, moss strands, algae, broken bits of leaves, and other detritus. Maybe even a spider testing itsway along the surface tension of the top. She tries to point out liveliness and interconnectedness, the odd patterns to be found in each sampling, and hopes to reveal glimpses of a different world, half-hidden in this one. Her chapbook, Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts (now out of print), was published after winning Still Waters Press "Women's Words" competition. Her poems have been placed in a wide variety of journals such as Bennington Review, The Main Street Rag, About Place Journal, Split Lip, and, most recently, Naugatuck River Review. Her poems have also appeared in the recent anthologies Purr and Yowl (World Enough Writers) and Thin Places and Sacred Spaces (Amethyst Press) among others. She has had poems nominated both for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.For close to thirty years Chris has been a board member of the Olympia Poetry Network and edited their monthly newsletter which has included a number of her short essays on the art and craft of poetry. Many of the lessons she passes on came through mentors such as David Wagoner, Heather McHugh, and Sharon Bryan at the UW where she received the equivalent of an MFA. She also learned much from Centrum classes led by Lisel Mueller, Marvin Bell, and both Staffords, William and Kim. She is also grateful for those writers who have shared their knowledge and experiences in book form. Tony Hoagland's Twenty Poems That Could Save America, The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser, and Jane Hirshfield's Ten Windows come to mind-but there are many more. Though she has lived for brief stints in England and Florida, snowbirded in Arizona for twenty years, and set foot on all seven continents, she now lives on a pothole lake within the city limits of Olympia, Washington, with her husband and cat named Sylvie-who, in a previous life, was known as Minnow. She gardens, keeps an eye on the wild ducks and geese, and offers support (mostly moral) to her ninety-plus-year-old mother.This award-winning collection, Not Now but Soon, is her fist full-length poetry collection.