Jewish In Seattle Magazine published this cover story featuring excerpts from some of our story-tellers’ oral histories of Yesler Way. Check out the print edition for centerfold illustrated map!
Read it here.
I wrote an essay about the transformative power of the erotic as a catalyst for social change for Seattle Arts & Lectures.
Working that walk so hard it hurts, it hurts, walking home in someone else’s high heels. You were who you were before you came here— a small animal, wandering, a drink in your hand. It hurts, walki…
Source: After the Party Pantoum
Sunday morning cast wide your nets. Nimble fingers tickle down a harvest of therapists for adolescents, depressed yet still trotting out to-do lists. Our listless rider of the emotional waterbed. W…
Source: Some Kind of Sonnet
Thank you, PANK, for publishing my prose poem “The Gods’ Funniest Home Videos.” This poem was inspired by Sandra Suarez, a woman who ripped off her clothes, rampaged through a McDonald’s and guzzled soft serve straight from the nozzle. Her rage resonated with me. As I watched, I felt such kinesthetic empathy with her actions. Both the power and futility of tearing up an evil place with bareskinned strength. She was having a bi-polar episode and some asshole employees videotaped it and now the whole world has watched and laughed at this woman in crisis. Every report describes her as “mother of two.” Female rage and motherhood, capitalism and nutrition, surveillance and Shadenfreude, oh human mammals and the stories we weave to keep safe. Read it here:
Tahoma Literary Review published my long poem “Oblique Strategies For Self-Knowledge That Had A Lot of Energy But Are Ultimately Depressing Because Hope Is Eclipsed by That Self-Loathing Marauder Who Loots Everything.” Read it here.
“The Killer Whale’s Penis” has found a home at The Awl. Read it here.
Thank you, Elizabeth Bradfield, “the naturalist” in this poem, for showing me your snapshots of adolescent whales wrestling with their 8-foot-long pink penises that I can never unsee. Thank you, Mark Bibbons at The Awl, for publishing this poem.
Profanity Hill: A Tour of Yesler Way is an art and heritage collaborative project, using community cartography to map our experiences on and memories of Seattle’s oldest path, Yesler Way, from Pioneer Square on Elliott Bay through the ID, CD, and on down to Leschi on the shore of Lake Washington.
Poetry Northwest is featuring “Backstory” in their Cinema Poetry NW series. Watch it here or here.
The poem first appeared (in print) in Poetry Northwest, Winter & Spring 2015 Issue. I wrote it while collaborating with visual artist Leo Saul Berk on a public art project that included a series of linked, looping palindromic story-poems about the Willamette River in Portland, OR. I shot this video in Seattle early one morning out walking my dog, Smudge, along Lake Washington.
Mutha Magazine published my essay, first performed at Washington Ensemble Theatre‘s Six Pack Series Celebrity-themed night (in the old space on 19th Ave E, previously the Northwest Film Forum’s Little Theater/Wiggly World where this photo happened:)
with my best lady Betsey Brock, master of sock puppets.
She took this picture of me directing her on how sock puppets interact. Betsey masterfully transformed a pink sock into a vulva puppet that night, and somehow operated 3 sock puppets with 2 hands and a foot.
Read the essay here.
Rachel Kessler 