Fiction, poetry, prose, and illustration by fourteen Tsunami Books clerks and fourteen significant others. A retrospective, a showcase, and a thank you to the people who, for twenty-seven years, have helped build an independent bookstore and community events center in Eugene, Oregon—and now, also, a new press in a new era. After a quarter century of bookselling and hard-won stewardship, our shelves bear fruit.

A whip-smart fiction debut, Our Secret Life in the Movies riffs on classic and cult cinema. Inspired by films from silent-era documentaries to music videos, the authors unfold a dual narrative about two boys growing up in the 1980s. Coming of age during the last days of the Cold War, these boys dream of space exploration and nuclear winter, Reaganomics and Dungeons & Dragons, Blade Runner and Red Dawn. Haunting, cinematic, and full of life, Our Secret Life makes it clear that we are in the...

Winner, 2021 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeMichael McGriff’s Eternal Sentences bears witness to the world of gravel roads, working-class families, and geographic isolation in poems that illuminate both common occurrence and the territories of the surreal. Here, in rendering every line as a single sentence, McGriff depicts a world seen through fragments, quick leaps, and wild associations. Haunted as much by place and people as by the possibilities of image-m...

"A lyricist at heart, McGriff is a masterful maker of metaphor."-Third Coast"There is majestic beauty in these descriptions, and it is clear that McGriff honors this place as a place-not as mere setting, but as a distinct element of his verse."-Gently Read LiteratureMichael McGriff's second full-length collection explores interior landscapes and illustrates life in a rural community in the Pacific Northwest. Whether tender or hard-hitting, McGriff juxtaposes natura...

SWEET ROMANCE: Though Lady Luck had more spunk than skills, she was determined not only to restore the bungalow she found, but also replace the sign above the porch, that read, "Born To Lose." She promised herself, that one day, when it looked the part, she would change its name to "Lady Luck." It was what her daddy always called her. It fit too. Poor as her family was, it never stopped them from making the best out of her life. Ever since third grade—when rich kids on the hill made fun of...

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet’s materials—words, objects, phenomena—are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed...

A young bridge painter is awakened from the hum of daily routine by a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall."The Bridge" is a story from Daniel Orozco's critically acclaimed collection Orientation, which leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an...

The lease is meaningless: a square paced first by seismic workers, and then your father, and then by every other man you know. Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the stubborn and often unflattering realities of industrial culture and its cast of hard-living men.

Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems tou...

The National Book Award finalist. " Limón's poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book." — The MillionsBright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."A book of bravado and introsp...

“Poetry,” writes best-selling author Ellen Bass, “is the way I pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray. It’s the way I embody my love for the world.”The Human Line, Bass’ seventh book of poems, startles with its precise detail, intimate images, and wild metaphors. Bass brings attention to life’s endearing absurdities, and many of the poems flash with a keen sense of humor. She also faces many of the crucial moral dilemmas of our time—geneti...

The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me*The parade for the slain police officergoes past the bakeryand the smell of fresh breadmakes the mourners salivate against their will.*—from "Note to Reality"Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our for...