Empty Bowl, an independent press founded in 1976 in the Pacific Northwest as a cooperative letterpress publisher, publishes literary anthologies, poetry, translations, essays, and ocassionally fiction.
Congratulations to editor Rena Priest and all the contributors to I Sing the Salmon Home, winner of the 2024 Washington State Book Award for Poetry.
Just released!
Andrew Schelling's new poetry collection—Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers—continues to explore lands of the American West and the traces of old language. Arranged in four sections, it offers poems "found" among the canyons and buttes of the Southwest, a paean to the Sanskrit dictionary, odes and elegies to deceased poets, and a series of love songs "to the tune of a ballad." Composed for an era in which many artists have abandoned the love song, the poems here are shaped by glacier-fed rivers and traditions of romance "old as ice.”
Plum Blossom Wine, poems by Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao translated by Sibyl James and Kang Xuepei, gives voice to an important female Chinese poet writing in a time when literature was dominated by men. James and Kang bring a contemporary sensibility to their translations, reading Li not as scholars but as modern women. They offer the reader an intimate glimpse into Li’s life, letting these poems full of wistful longing resonate across the centuries like a temple bell just rung.
