Gobsh*te Quarterly

07/06/2025

06/06/2025

Tonight, tonight, it all begins tonight -

3 of Gobsh*te Quarterly's poetry contributors, including Holbrook Award winner Douglas Spangle, will tickle the air at Birdhouse Books in Vancouver!

Books will be Available, & All are Welcome!
7 p.m.

20/05/2025

Reading The Fires; hearing all the others.

09/05/2025

M. F. McAuliffe will read from The Fires

Monday, May 19th, 7 p.m.
Free admission

The Alberta Street Pub
1036 NE Alberta St,, Portland
503-284-7556

?The Fires is a jazzy read. From the imagistic pulse to the rhetorical throb, from startling devastation to the richness of what is hidden from view, and from the classical to the profane, these poems behold the obscene with the rare, the junkyard with the unattainable relic, all while circling over the helpless griefs of the early 21st century.”
— David Biespiel, author, The Education of a Young Poet

“While acknowledging — without flinching, without euphemism — our world's "complex futility," these poems also embrace our world's complex beauty, aspiring to "walk in the bright underbelly of the stars." McAuliffe's nuanced, powerful work does both.”
— Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

07/05/2025

Two very different books ... both in stock again
In the Blue Room in Powell's downtown -

04/05/2025

Friend of Gobsh*te Quarterly Richard Nash, editor emeritus of Soft Skull Press, founder of the Cursor platform and the Red Lemonade imprint.

Photo: AWP, Portland, April 2019

30/04/2025

AN AFTERNOON WITH ED SANDERS
Woodstock, April 19th 2010

Drive slowly
Deer wander here!
He sets up fences for them
Around the flower beds, scatters
Kernels of corn. Do you
Know Sharon Tate?
I need no Polanski
For that―nor the Pope
The police reports suffice
& the memory of those
Who have grown old with me
The parlor clock counts 12 species of birds
The parakeet & the cockatoo
Intervene, also Iceland's
Volcanic ashes. Globes, caskets
Bookcases―books from Ginzy
To Stravinsky. A harmonium
An aquarium, plants
Everywhere. "Since 1958 we've been
Together & he's still
Always a mystery," laughs
Miriam. Be Free! SyQuest
The problem of archiving―
Drive slowly
Deer wander here!
Black tennis shoes, black jeans
Black jacket, white sticker:
Imagine Peace
The poison ivy does not sting him.

– Florian Vetsch
from The Flaying of Marsyas
translated by Douglas Spangle

29/04/2025

Nos. 3 & 15

from 25 Poems on the Death of Ursula K. Le Guin
- M. F. McAuliffe

27/04/2025

NatPoMo at Reprobate/GobQ Books -

Discounts &
free shipping on books published before 2024!

25/04/2025

BUSHFIRE DREAMING

The bush burns, animals burn, houses burn,
sky burns
In the sky a crimson koala burns
Now the sky is burning black
The sky is soot
Falls on our faces.
Now a whirling in the wind, whirling of feathers,
Demonic whirling as if the devil is in it
it is crows, a cry of crows, whirling on their
wings
They land in the trees, not to rest
They hang from trees black and burned
dripping with blood, dripping red rain on us
as we try to find air.

– Judith Steele
from Islands of Disbelief

22/04/2025

IMMIGRANT’S SONG

All I wanted to be
Since I refused to speak my mother tongue
At the age of three was
A ham sandwich
I wanted to disappear between the triangular blankets
Of the plain and ordinary and not to be noticed any more
Not like a panini or even a club
With all its complex layers
But a ham sandwich
Not with anything fancy like schinken or bauernbrot
Not even with a little Grey Poupon
Simple Oscar Meyer ham cut square with rounded corners
On American white bread
Maybe with a little iceberg and a touch of mayo
Simple white mayo
Half preservative and half cholesterol
With a refrigerated metal tang
That reminds the taste buds of its proper place
You could curl it up in your fist
Crush it down to a ball a quarter of its size
That fits easily in the mouth
Between the swallows of Royal Crown
In a hot and humid summer afternoon.

– Michael Shay
from The Words I Own